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THE 



NEW BIHTH 



OR, 



THE WORK OF THE HOLT SPIRIT. 



AUSTIN PHELPS, 

PROFESSOR IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, AUTHOR OF 
"THE STILL HOUR." 



We will trust God. The blank interstices 
Men take forHuins, He will build into. 

Mrs. Bnovrmxa. 



BOSTON: 

G- O XT HI. r> J± 1ST T> LINCOLN, 

5 9 WASHINGTON STREET. 

NEW YORK: SHELDON AND C O M P A N Y . 

CINCINNATI : GEO. S. BLANCHARD AND CO. 

1867. 



*0£ 



The Library 
of Congress 

washington 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by 
GOULD AND LINCOLN, 
In the Clerk's office of the District Court for the District of Massa- 
chusetts. 



33 3 



1 



\ 




well and Rollins, Printers, 
122 Washington Street, Boston. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



3> HE first four chapters of this volume have 
£/ appeared, substantially, in the Bibliotheca 
9S^P Sacra for the current year. By special 

& arrangement with the publisher of that 
Quarterly they are now re-issuecl, with one ad- 
ditional Chapter. 

If my brethren in the ministry, Sabbath-school 
teachers, and other thoughtful Christians, find sug- 
gestions in these pages which help them, either 
in their own Christian culture or in their efforts 
to win souls to Christ, my chief object in this 
publication will be gained. I cannot but hope, 
also, that thinking men w r ho do not own the Christ- 
ian name w r ill find here the Way of Salvation, com- 
mended to them by the same intuitions and calm 
reasonings to which they are accustomed to judge 
of truth in other things. 

AUSTIN PHELPS. 

Andover Theological Seminary, Nov. 15, 1866. 



\ 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Pagrg 

CON VERSION — ITS NATURE 11 

I. — Faith of Common Sense in the Necessity of Con- 
version 11 

II. — Biblical Emblems of Conversion. ... 16 

III. — Conversion not a Ritual Change . . . 22 

IV. — Conversion not a Constitutional Change . . 24 

Conversion more than Miracle .... 28 

Conversion a Fact in Experience . • . . 30 

Conversion a Reasonable Change . • • . 31 

Constitutional Conversion not a Duty . . . 36 

V. — Conversion not a Mystical Change ... 38 



VI CONTENTS. 

VI. — Conversion" a Radical Change 
Counterfeits of Conversion 
A Converted Man, a New Man 
Character under a Law of Perpetuity 
Conversion the Supreme Change 



Pago 

44 
47 
51 
52 
56 



CHAPTER II. 

REGENERATION THE WORK OF GOD ... 58 

I. — What do we mean by Divine Sovereignty in Re- 
generation ? 69 

II. — Regeneration a Solitary Disclosure op God . 63 

III. — Biblical View op the Supernatural in the New 

Birth . 67 

IV. — Experience op the New Birth suggestive of a 

Supernatural Cause 71 

God suggested by the Manner of Conversion . . 73 

God suggested by the Magnitude of Conversion . 78 

God suggested by the Phenomena of Revivals . . SI 

God suggested by Unconscious Conversion . . 84 



COXTEXTS. Vll 

Pago 

V. — Moral Uses op the Doctrine of Supernatural 

Regeneration 90 

The Profound Nature of Depravity .... 90 

The Harmony of Truth with Mind .... 94 

Man's Renewal, a Work worthy of God ... 95 

The Lowliness of God 96 

The Holy Spirit a Personal Friend .... 99 

The Law of Dependence 100 



CHAPTER III. 

TRUTH THE INSTRUMENT OF REGENERATION . 103 
I. — Biblical View op Truth as a Power . . 104 
II. — The Instrumentality op Truth a Fact in Re- 
generation 109 

The Instrumentality of Truth Invariable . . 112 

The Regeneration of Infants 115 

III. — The Mode in which Truth acts in Regenera- 
tion 119 

TV. — The Simplicity of Regeneration . . . 124 

V. — The Evidences of Conversion intelligible to 

Common Sense ....... 129 



Vlll 



CONTENTS. 



VI. — Creed Essential to Character . 
VII. — Christianity Independent of Fine Art 
VIII. — The True Ideal of the Pulpit 

" Great Sermons " . 
Affectations of the .Pulpit 
Popular Criticism of the Pulpit 
Repose in Truth 



Page 

132 
135 
140 

143 
146 
150 
155 



CHAPTEE IY. 



RESPONSIBILITY AS RELATED TO SOVEREIGNTY 
IN THE NEW BIRTH .... 
I. — Difficulties of the Subject practical 
II. — The Sense of Responsibility an Intuition 
III. — Responsibility not Destroyed by Depravity 
IV. — Biblical Theory of Responsibility . 
V. — Ability the Measure of Obligation . 



" I can, because I ought " 

Ability the Teaching of Common Sense . 

VI. — Responsibility and Sovereignty Harmonious 



159 
1G2 
165 
168 
173 
177 

178 
181 

186 



CONTENTS. 
VII. — How to Answer the Inquiry, "What must I do 



TO BE SAVED 7 



IX 

Page 



190 



, Repentance and Faith Practicable, like other Duties 192 
The Dependence of Guilt more Absolute than the 

Dependence of Necessity 196 

Grace not Justice 203 

Encouragement to Immediate Repentance . . 206 



The Ruin of a Soul its own work 



. 210 



CHAPTER V. 



THE INDWELLING OE THE HOLY SPIRIT . . 214 

I. — The Sacredness op a Christian's Being . . 215 

The Indwelling of the Spirit not an Incarnation . 218 

IL — The Restoration op Lost Self-respect . , 221 

The Tyranny of Remorse . . . . ,221 

Discoveries of a Pure Conscience . . . ,224 

Courage in the Day of Judgment . . . .272 



K. CONTENTS. 

Page 

III. — The Intensity op Regenerate Life . . . 229 

Latent Piety Unnatural 230 

Is Regenerate Experience Fanatical ? . . .232 

IV. — The Working op the Spirit by Discoverable 

Laws 236 

The Law of Harmony with other Revelations of God 238 
The Law of Harmony with the Nature of Mind . 239 

The Law of Co-operation 243 

The Law of Sanctification by Prayer . . . 246 
The Law of Trust in a Divine Plan . . • .250 



THE NEW BIRTH. 



CHAPTER I. 

CONVERSION — ITS NATURE. 
I. 

FAITH OF COMMON SENSE IN THE NECESSITY OF 
CONVERSION. 

})T was an exaggeration, yet one which con- 
tained more of truth than of hyperbole, in 
which a late writer affirmed that the most 
^V characteristic thing this world has to show 
^ to other worlds is a scaffold on the morn- 
ing of an execution. It is true that to a holy 
mind the distinctive idea in the condition of this 
world is that of guilt. It is not dignity ; it is 
not beauty ; it is not wisdom ; it is not power ; 
it is guilt. It is not weakness ; it is not mis- 
fortune ; it is not suffering ; it is not death ; it 

is guilt. 

11 



12 THE NEW BIRTH. 

Any thoughtful observer, therefore, must be- 
lieve that this world needs to be changed, in 
order to become the dwelling-place of God. 
No historian, with any just conception of man 
as he has been and is on the theatre of nations, 
doubts this. No philosopher with any knowl- 
edge of God as he is, doubts this. No man, 
with any honest insight into his own heart, 
doubts this necessity of change, to fit man for 
the presence of God. A seraph hovering over 
the field of Solferino could scarcely feel a more 
appalling conviction of this necessity than any 
individual sinner feels, when his own heart and 
the idea of God are revealed to his conscience 
side by side. 

Such has been the general belief of the race. 
They are the few maniacs who have denied it. 
The great religious systems of the world have 
been founded upon the conviction that man must 
be changed. Be the gods what they may, man 
must be changed, to be at peace with any deity. 
Our blinded and sickened race has sought to 
change itself by most laborious and cunning 
devices. Remorse has been the equivalent of 
genius in its inventions. By baptismal rites, by 



ITS NECESSITY. 13 

holy anointings, by branding with mysterious 
symbols, by incantations of magic, by sacred 
amulets, by ablutions in consecrated rivers ; by 
vigils and abstinences and flagellations, and the 
purgative of fire ; by distortions of conscience 
in rites of which it is a shame to speak ; and by 
that saddest of all human beliefs, which would 
doom a human spirit to migrate for millions of 
years through metamorphoses of bestial and 
reptile existence, — man has struggled to change 
himself, that he might be prepared to dwell at 
last under the pure eye of God. Even those 
fools who have said in their heart, there is no 
personal God, have drifted unconsciously in 
their speculations upon a caricature indeed, and 
yet a resemblance of this very faith in man's 
need of a change to make him worthy of the 
divinity which is within him. 

It is impressive to observe how Pantheism, in 
its wildest freaks, is dragged towards a doctrine 
of regeneration. The idea haunts it. It speaks 
in language which a Christian preacher need not 
refuse in describing the phenomenon of conver- 
sion. Its apostles tell us of a certain stage in 
individual history at which the soul must awake 



14 THE NEW BIRTH. 

and "bestir itself, and struggle as if in the 
throes of birth"; that it must "wrestle with 
doubt, or cower trembling under the wings of 
mystery"; that it must "search heaven and 
earth for answers to its questions " ; that it must 
"turn in loathing from the pleasures of sense," 
under its "irrepressible longings after the good, 
the true, the beautiful ; after freedom, immor- 
tality." They tell us of the tumult and 
torment of this "crisis of internal life." They 
profess to inform us how the soul may make its 
way out of this chaos of distress into a "noble, 
perfect manhood " ; how, as one has expressed 
it, the soul may "once more feel around it the 
fresh breath of the open slry, and over it the 
clear smile of heaven ; how the streams of 
thought may again flow on in harmony; how 
content is to be regained with one's position in 
the system of things ; how all fear and torment 
are to give place to blessedness ; how love is 
again to suffuse the world, and over every cloud 
of mystery, to be cast a bow of peace." 

Thus, I repeat, the idea of regeneration haunts 
philosophy in its most impious departures from 
God. With a God, or without a God, philoso- 



ITS NECESSITY. 15 

phy cannot get away from the sense of the ne- 
cessity of a change in man to fit him for some- 
thing to which he is predestined. Put into the 
language of any philosophy on this subject the 
two ideas of the Holy Spirit and of sin, and a 
Christian preacher may adopt the whole of it in 
his delineation of conversion. 

This necessity, therefore, of some great, crit- 
ical, formative change in man, may be assumed 
as a truth on which the mind of the race is sub- 
stantially a unit. On this theme, as on many 
of the first principles of religion, the wander- 
ings of the human mind from God are forever 
checked by oceanic currents which draw it in- 
ward, and compel it to sail along the coast of 
truth, never far or long out of sight of the 
mainland. 

What, then, is the nature of that change which 
man needs to render him an object of divine com- 
placency? Our dependence upon the word of 
God for the answer is immediate and absolute. 
Philosophy, independently of the scriptures, has 
taught the world almost nothing with regard to 
it. Even theological standards, uninspired, 
have added nothing to the wisdom of an awak- 



1 6 THE NEW BIRTH. 

ened conscience in a child, except as they have 
translated the declarations of the word of God. 
We all wish to know, on a subject like this, not 
so much what philosophers or theologians have 
believed as what God has said. 



BIBLICAL EMBLEMS OF COX'VEBSION'. 

It will be instructive, then, to recall briefly 
certain of the representative passages of the 
Bible which set forth the nature of conversion. 

The most familiar of these represent religious 
conversion by the change which occurs in natu- 
ral birth. One can almost feel the fascination 
of the calm, subdued authority with which our 
Lord taught to his timid pupil the paradox of 
regeneration : " Except a man be horn of water 
and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the king- 
dom of God." w Except a man be born again he 
can not see the kingdom, of God. " " That which 
is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is 
born of the Spirit is spirit." Birth of body — 
birth of soul ! The one stands over against the 
other, as if for the sake of reflecting each by its 
resemblance to the other. Then, to check the 



FROM DEATH TO LIFE. 17 

astonishment excited by the seeming extrava- 
gance of his speech, he acids : "Marvel not that 
I said, Ye must be born again." "Marvel not " 
— this is no cause for dumb amazement ; it is 
but one of the rudiments of truth. Art thou a 
master in Israel, and knowest not this thing? 

A similar boldness of imagery is manifest in 
that class of passages which represent religious 
conversion under the figure of a change from 
death to life. As if birth from non-existence 
were too natural an emblem to express the 
whole truth of the anomalous change effected 
by regeneration, we hear an apostle exclaiming : 
" Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the 
dead." "You hath he quickened, who were 
dead in trespasses and sins." Another, in the 
assurance of a regenerate experience, declares : 
" We know that we have passed from death unto 
life." Conceive what intensity of significance 
this metaphor must have had to those of the 
apostolic age, in which the miracle of resurrec- 
tion from the tomb was a reality in current his- 
tory, a fact of common fame ! 

A similar vividness of contrast is preserved 
by a third class of passages, which express con- 



18 THE NEW BIRTH. 

version by the figure of passing from darkness 
to light. What is the force of such language as 
this ? " Ye are a chosen generation ; " he " hath 
called you out of darkness into his marvellous 
light." "Ye were sometimes darkness." Not 
in darkness only, but darkness itself. Night 
was the symbol of your very souls. "But now 
are ye light in the Lord." Not in light, merely, 
but light itself : 

"Holy Light — offspring of heaven, first-born." 

The noonday is the emblem of your being. 
Among the most beautiful of the scriptural 
titles of the regenerate, are these : "children of 
the light," "children of the clay," "saints in 
light." Some of the most stirring exhortations 
to renewed men are founded upon this contrast 
in nature. "Cast off the works of darkness, 
put on light " — " we are not of the night " — 
" have no fellowship with the works of darkness " 
— " what communion hath light with darkness ? " 
The force of such language is not diminished by 
a fourth class of passages, which speak of con- 
version under the figure of a change in the most 
central organ of physical vitality. "A new 



THE TWO KINGDOMS. 19 

heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will 
I put within you." " I will take away the stony 
heart." "I will give you a heart of flesh." 
" Make to you a new heart." A new heart ! To 
this clay, what words of wisdom have we learned 
by which to express a regenerate state more in- 
telligibly or more vividly than by these, which 
we breathe into the prayers of our children ? 

But perhaps the climax of the daring imagery 
of the scriptures on this subject is exceeded in a 
fifth class of passages, of a literal force, which 
represent God and Satan as the sovereigns of 
hostile empires ; and the change which man 
undergoes in conversion as a transfer from the 
one dominion to the other. Paul did not scruple 
to affirm his commission to preach a gospel which 
should " turn men from the power of Satan unto 
God." "The power of Satan!" This was no 
fiction of a distempered brain, in an age when 
demoniacal possession was a common and an 
acknowledged form of bodily affliction. " The 
Father hath delivered us from the power of 
darkness, and hath translated us into the king- 
dom of his dear Son." w The power of dark- 
ness ! " This was no feeble image to the thought 



20 THE JSTE W BIB TH. 

of an Oriental people, whose faith had filled the 
night air with demoniac spirits. "In time past 
ye walked according to the prince of the power 
of the air. But God, rich in mercy, hath quick- 
ened us, hath raised us up, hath made us sit in 
heavenly places, in Christ Jesus." "Walking 
according to the prince of the power of the 
air ! " This was no mysticism and no hyperbole 
to the ancient faith, whose angelology peopled 
the elements with spiritual intelligences, some 
of whom swayed the atmosphere malignantly. 
" The kingdom of Christ " — " the kingdom of 
the dear Son" — "heavenly places in Christ 
Jesus " I These were conceptions of unutter- 
able meaning to minds whose only ideal of 
government was that of absolute empire, and 
whose thought of obedience was wrapped up in 
that eternal idea of loyalty, in which self is for- 
gotten, and the sovereign of the realm is all in 
all. 

These passages may suffice as a specimen of 
the methods by which religious conversion is 
described in the style of inspiration. Yet no 
possible selection of proof-texts could be the 
strongest evidence of the scriptural doctrine of 



BIBLICAL PROOF. 21 

regeneration. The climax of proof of such a 
doctrine is that it pervades the system of bibli- 
cal teaching. It is one of the constructive ideas 
of inspiration which are not so much here or 
there, as everywhere. It is pervasive, like the 
life-blood in the body. It is like caloric in the 
globe. If a tortuous exegesis evades it in one 
passage, it is inevitable in the next. Expel it 
from a thousand texts, and it remains in secret 
implications all along the interval pages Between 
them. Wrench it away from every text in which 
theologians have found it, and its echo still re- 
verberates from one end of the Bible to the 
other. We can get rid of it, only by flinging 
away the system of revelation in which it 
breathes — everywhere present, everywhere 
needed to complete the symmetry of truth, and 
everywhere imperative as an oracle of God. 

Our chief inquiry, therefore, should be : 
What does this language mean in which we are 
taught man's need of a change to render him a 
friend of God? 



22 TEE NEW BIRTE. 

m. 

CONVERSION NOT A RITUAL CHANGE. 

The scriptural emblems of conversion repre- 
sent a change of character, as distinct from any 
variety of change by ritual observances. No 
single conception of religious conversion is more 
forcibly suggested by the Bible than this — that 
it is a reality and not a form. If the sole object 
of the scriptures in their teaching of this doc- 
trine had been to prevent mistake on this point, 
and to reprove the proneness of the human 
mind to degrade religious experience in a relig- 
ious form, their language could scarcely have 
been more happily adjusted to its object. With 
this volume in our hands, we do not know how 
to reason with men who exalt ceremonial ordi- 
nances or formulae as substitutes for a change of 
heart. We must rank among the tokens of 
intellectual disease, we must regard as a degra- 
dation in a civilized mind, that taste which 
leads one to protrude a Christian baptism, or 
the imposition of consecrated hands, or the pro- 
fession of a Christian creed, or communion with 
a Christian church, or the reception of the 



A VITAL CHANGE, 23 

Lord's supper, in advance of that work of God's 
Spirit by which a sinner is born again. It 
seems like solemn trifling to debate on such a 
faith. " How readest thou? " is the only query 
by which we can suggest the remedy for the 
sickliness of such a mind . To the law and to 
the testimony ! If the scriptural idea of regen- 
eration be definable in any particular of its ver- 
satile exhibition here, it surely is so in this, that 
the change it portrays is independent of exter- 
nal form or symbol. It is an event in spiritual 
experience. It is a change in the man. The 
man — the vital, the immortal part of him — 
feels the change. He lives it. When we pass 
from this substance of the thing, to consider 
forms, ordinances, creeds, professions, as dis- 
tinct from the thing, as its substitutes or its 
superiors or its constituents, we descend from 
realities to mimic playthings. These incidents 
to a religious life lose their significance as sym- 
bols even. They are symbols of nothing. They 
are a forgery and a mummery. 

In the nature of conversion there is nothing 
that we know of which should forbid its occur- 
rence in a disembodied state. If we could know 



24 THE NEW BIRTH. 

that probation encloses the intermediate state 
of the departed, we might conceive of regen- 
eration in all its majesty as experienced in that 
land of pure spirits. Without a form to signal- 
ize it, without a whisper to proclaim it, there 
would be joy in heaven. When, therefore, men 
degrade the dignity of this change to that of an 
appendage to a ritual ; when they overlay its 
simplicity by imposing upon it burdensome and 
intricate ordinances ; when they overshadow its 
delicate spirituality by building around and 
above it even the scriptural symbols which 
express it, we only speak the uniform language 
of the scriptures and of common sense, when 
we catch the tone of an apostle and say — 
"we do not know whether we have baptized — 
Christ sent us not for this — lest the cross of 
Christ should be of no effect." 

TV. 

CONVERSION NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE. 

John Randolph, in a letter to a friend, writ- 
ten at a time when his mind was agitated by 
religious inquiry, speaks of a volume which he 



JOHX RANDOLPH. 25 

bad then before him, and in which it was affirm- 
ed, he says, " that no man is converted without 
the experience of a miracle." " Such," he con- 
tinues, " is the substance " of the author's faith : 
A man ?? must be sensible of the working of a 
miracle in his own person. Now, my good 
friend, I have never experienced anything like 
this. I have been sensible, and am always, of 
the proneness to sin in my nature. I have 
grieved unfeignedly for my manifold transgres- 
sions. I have thrown myself upon the mercy 
of my Eedeemer. But I have felt nothing like 
what this writer requires." "It appears incredi- 
ble that one so contrite as I sometimes know 
myself to be should be rejected entirely by 
infinite mercy." Yet " I fear that I presume 
upon God's mercy. I sometimes dread that I 
am in a far worse condition than if I had never 
heard God's word." 

This extract illustrates the method in which 
minds not accustomed to the technicalities of a 
theological dialect will often interpret and mis- 
interpret unguarded or confused speech respect- 
ing the doctrine of regeneration. It is the 
legitimate interpretation of any language which 



26 THE NEW BIRTH. 

degrades conversion from the level of a moral 
change to that of a change in the constitution of 
a soul. I say " degrades conversion " ; for, what 
do we mean by a constitutional change ? As ap- 
plied to a spiritual intelligence, a constitutional 
change is a change either in its essence, or in 
its susceptibilities, or in its executive powers. 
But a change in either or all of these is, in 
respect of the ends of moral government, of 
less profound significance than a change of char- 
acter. 

The world has been very slow in learning 
that miracles are not the grandest disclosure of 
Omnipotence. 

The material world contains more sublime 
displays of power than those of miraculous dig- 
nity. The sidereal universe, swayed by the 
forces of law, is a nobler work of God than 
that in which he said: "Sun stand thou still 
upon Gibeon ; and thou moon, in the valley of 
Ajalon." In the animal creation there is a 
grandeur of divine working which no miracle 
has stamped upon it. The government of ani- 
mal nature by laws which make it as true to 
God's will as the line of a bee in its flight, or 



LA W GEE A TER THAX MIX A CLE. 2 7 

the swoop of an eagle from its eyrie, is a more 
illustrious expression of the divine mind than 
the piling up of the quails in the wilderness two 
cubits deep. 

So, in the world of mind, law is itself a more 
majestic thought than that of the suspension of 
law. The government of an intelligent universe 
under the law of moral freedom, exhibits a more 
imperial reach of God's power than the govern- 
ment of such a universe outside of that law. 
The government of finite mind, speaking anthro- 
pologically, is a more august achievement than 
the creation of that mind. The idea of character 
is an advance upon the idea of nature. Charac- 
ter in a soul, conceived of as an effect of God's 
working, is a more sublime product than the 
make of that soul. Do you conceive of moral 
character as a something in the constitution of a 
soul, like the grain of a piece of wood ? By such 
a conception you abase the soul itself, for the 
purpose of moral government, to a level with a 
piece of wood. Do you define to yourself de- 
pravity as a viciousness ingrained in the very 
build of a spirit, like the knarl of an oak? By 
such a definition you precipitate the spirit itself, 



28 THE NEW BIRTH. 

for the ends of moral government, to a level 
with the knarl of an oak. Do you imagine gra- 
cious affections as inserted into the very nature 
of a man, as one would infuse a new gas into the 
atmosphere ? By such a fancy you degrade the 
man himself, for the intents of moral govern- 
ment, to a level with a gas in the atmosphere. 
Do you describe regeneration as an act which 
impregnates a sinner's being with a new power, 
as you would magnetize a piece of steel ? By 
such a description you drag down a sinner's be- 
ing, for the objects of moral government, to a 
level with a piece of steel. Omnipotence can 
no more rule the one than the other by a moral 
system. 

CONVERSION MORE THAN MIRACLE. 

Is it, then, to be supposed that such concep- 
tions as these underlie the scriptural emblems of 
that change which a sinner needs to render him 
an object of God's complacency? There is in 
these emblems a height and a depth, a length 
and a breadth, of significance, which such 
thoughts of regeneration and its surroundings 
in the system of truth do not fill up, and fill out, 



A CHANGE OF CHARACTER. 29 

and fathom to the bottom. By the side of such 
emblems these thoughts appear sensuous and 
materialistic. Nothing but a literal interpreta- 
tion of the language of these emblems can bind 
them to the sphere of constitutional phenomena. 
The instant we leave their literal force, — that 
is, the moment we conceive of them as emblems 
of truth, — truth is buoyant within them. It 
springs up above the sphere of merely creative 
power, into that of moral empire, where God 
makes flexible to his will the immense popula- 
tions of intelligence and of liberty which fill 
the universe with his own image. There, man 
is a man, and not a manikin. A sinner is a sin- 
ner, and not a wretch only. He is responsible, 
self-acting, free ; responsible because self-acting ; 
self-acting because free, and free because other- 
wise moral government over him is a fiction. 
Conversion being thus a change in the character 
of a free sinner, regeneration, in respect of its 
moral solemnity, is something other and more 
than re-creation. It belongs to another and a 
loftier plane of Omnipotence. 

If anything more than the natural interpreta- 
tion of the Scriptures were needed to establish this 



30 THE NEW BIRTH. 

view, — that conversion is a change of character, 
as distinct from constitutional changes, — two 
very simple facts would corroborate this 'as the 
necessary interpretation; 

CONVERSION — A FACT IN EXPERIENCE. 

One is, that Christian experience proves no 
other than a change of character in conver- 
sion. Conversion is an experience. It is one 
of the most ancient and one of the most modern 
facts in the mental history of this world. Con- 
sciousness has taken cognizance of it in un- 
numbered hearts. Real life has proved it by 
innumerable tests. Yet no regenerate man 
knows anything of a re-creation of his nature, 
or a multiplication of his powers. No Christian 
is conscious of new faculties. None exhibits 
such in common life. A converted man thinks, 
reasons, remembers, imagines now; and he did 
all these before conversion. A regenerate heart 
feels, desires, loves, hates, now ; and it did all 
these before. A new-born soul chooses, re- 
solves, plans, executes ; and it did all these be- 
fore. The chief subjects of thought are changed 
— they are revolutionized. The prime objects 



A REASONABLE CHAXGE. 31 

of love and hatred are changed — they are trans- 
posed. The supreme inclination of the affec- 
tions is changed — it is reversed. The character 
of the purposes is changed — it is transformed. 
In these respects, indeed, old things are passed 
away, and all things are new. But beyond this, 
neither consciousness nor .observation testifies to 
any other change. No other could add to this 
any weight of moral significance. The man 
could have been, so far as we know, no more 
a Christian, no more an object of complacency 
to God, no more at peace with his own con- 
science, if regenerating sfrace had been a solvent 

© © © 

of his nature, and had reduced it to its elements, 
and reconstructed the man by an improved pro- 
cess of creation. 

CONVERSION — A REASONABLE CHAXGE. 

The other fact is, that the unregenerate man 
cannot be made intelligently to feel the reason- 
ableness of God in making salvation dependent 
on any other change in a sinner than a change 
of character. The way of salvation is urged upon 
the acceptance of men, in the Bible, as a reason- 
able way. God lays open the whole subject, as 



32 THE NEW BIRTH. 

our Lord did to Nicodemus, as one which is sus- 
ceptible of reasonable defence. It is to be pre- 
sumed to be capable of seeming reasonable to an 
unregenerate mind. The revelation of the mind 
of God on the subject is addressed to an unre- 
generate world. Its appeal is to the good sense 
of men — that sum total of the intellectual virtues 
equipoised and symmetrical. "Marvel not" — 
" Come, let us reason together" — "Are not my 
ways equal ? saith the Lord " — ' 6 What more 
could I do to my vineyard that I have not done 
in it?" — "O fools, and slow of heart to be- 
lieve." Such is the tone of inspiration in expos- 
ing its great organic truths to the test of reason. 
But the theory of the necessity of any other 
change in a sinner than a change of character, as 
the condition of salvation, does not bear this 
scrutiny of the good sense of men. A sinner's 
conscience does not respond to it reasonably ; 
his reason does not respond to it conscientiously. 
Therefore it does not deepen his conviction of 
guilt intelligently. If he reasons consistently 
upon it, — and some minds will reason consist- 
ently here, to their own hurt, — if he reasons 
consistently upon it, the inevitable inference 



THE CONFLICT OF NATURE. 33 

from it seems to be that he has no responsibility 
respecting his soul's salvation until regeneration 
has been performed upon him. I cannot rid my- 
self of a sense of sin ; guilt seems to burn within 
me, like an unearthly fire ; yet in reason, with 
this view of conversion, I cannot see myself to 
be any more responsible for sin than for my 
shadow. IfeelgwWt to be my character, and the 
whole of it ; but in reason, upon this theory, it 
seems to be my organism only. I feel the bur- 
den of sin as if / were its creator, and yet in 
reason, with this conception of it, it seems to 
have been born with me by no act of mine. Then 
by whose act? I feel the unworthiness of my 
depravity ; I am speechless as if I deserved to 
be damned for it, and yet in reason, with this 
view of it, the very marrow of my bones seems 
to be as much responsible for it as the immortal 
part of me. Then, when by reason I pursue the 
phantom which yet I feel to be no phantom, 
where do I find its last refuge ? Where is the 
crime lodged of originating the thing for which I 
am damned ? Yet shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do right ? 

That is an awf ul antagonism — it seems irrev- 

3 



34 THE NEW BIRTH. 

erent to conceive of it — in which a sinner's con- 
science and reason are thus arrayed in conflict, 
the one condemning him, the other accusing God. 
It is more than a " conflict of ages." Under the 
theory before us, it would be the conflict of eter- 
nity. Unregenerate mind in the agitations of 
such unnatural warfare, with unregenerate pas- 
sions boiling over under the inevitable sense of 
injustice, cannot be reasoned with. You might 
as well reason with Vesuvius. That soul can be 
made to feel helpless, hopeless, reckless ; but in 
reason, that will be the helplessness, the hope- 
lessness, the recklessness of a victim, not a sin- 
ner. We may silence the victim. We may 
overwhelm him with arguments which he cannot 
answer. We may overawe him with learned and 
abstruse conjectures. We may teach him what 
the wise men have recorded of the pre-existence 
of souls ; and his soul may be troubled because 
he cannot disprove it. We may discourse to him 
of his personality in Adam, his participation in 
the Fall, his taste of the forbidden tree ; and he 
may be speechless because he cannot conceive of 
it, and because, if he should speak, he could only 
say : "This is my infirmity, that I cannot rem em- 



THE CONFLICT OF NATURE. 35 

ber Eden ; it is not so much to me, even, as a 
dream when one awaketk." We may expound to 
him the "federal representation," and the "im- 
putation of sin"; and, for a moment, he may- 
impute it as a sin to his soul that he cannot help 
shuddering at the shock which that conception 
gives to the conscience with which Adam has 
endued him ! We may weigh him down with 
theoiogic definitions and qualifications and dis- 
tinctions, and may back these up w^ith authorities 
and catechisms, till, through his sheer bewilder- 
ment at our prodigious learning, his faith may 
be held bound by our dogma, like mercury com- 
pressed in a globe. But the instant the theoiogic 
weights are taken off, the globe flies open, and 
the prisoner springs 'out into the free air. Once 
more in his right mind, his faith falls back to the 
logic of common sense, and he feels as John Ean- 
dolph did, that, on such a theory of depravity, 
if regeneration means anything, it means that 
conversion is a miracle. He has no more to do 
with it than he had with his birth. Then the 
eternal conflict in his nature — conscience on this 
side, and reason on that side — breaks out with 
.redoubled rage. Conscience thunders, "There is 



36 TEE NEW BIRTH. 

no peace saith my God to the wicked." Keason 
flings back in defiant answer, " There is no peace 
saith my God to the victim." 

CONSTITUTIONAL CONVERSION NOT A DUTY. 

The doctrine of a constitutional change in con- 
version is seldom, if ever, consistently preached. 
It cannot be thus preached by a man who is in- 
tent on results in real life. I may hold it as a 
theorem, but I cannot preach it. I may defend 
it as a thesis among theologians, but I cannot 
press it home upon men from the pulpit. I can- 
not preach it to careless sinners. I cannot 
preach it to awakened inquirers. No man can 
preach it to an audience of anxious men who are 
seeking after God. No man can preach it in a 
revival of religion. There is something which 
stifles it in the very atmosphere of the place 
in which earnest men have come together, to ask 
what they must do to be saved. 

One preacher of distinction in our own coun- 
try, during the early part of the present century, 
who thought that he held this view of regenera- 
tion, very consistently acknowledged that he 
could not preach to impenitent men in a revival 



THE TEST B Y THE P ULPIT. 3 7 

of religion. He could preach, and, as some of 
his published discourses prove, with great power 
to professing Christians on themes of Christian 
experience, but he could not preach to unregen- 
erate hearers at a time when they felt salvation 
to be a present business, and the business of an 
emergency. On one occasion, when invited to 
preach at such a time by Professor Stuart, then 
a pastor in New Haven, he declined the service, 
and, with tearful eyes, assigned as his reason 
that his preaching was not adapted to the de- 
mands of such scenes as he had witnessed there. 
He could not adjust to them his views of the 
nature of a change of heart. A revival was an 
emergency for which no provision was found in 
his theory of the way in which the gospel should 
be preached to unregenerate men. Was not 
such a confession the strongest possible corrob- 
orative evidence that he had mistaken the doctrine 
of the scriptures? 

We cannot err, then, in adopting as one of the 
first principles of revelation on the subject of the 
new birth, that it is a change of character, as 
distinct from constitutional changes in the soul. 
It is a change in that, and only that, for which 



38 THE NEW BIRTH. 

conscience and reason, reason and conscience, 
hold a man responsible, as for a thing of his own 
originating and his own nurturing. 

"ST. 

CONVERSION— NOT A MYSTICAL CHANGE. 

Some doctrines of the Scriptures are so clear 
that their very perspicuity is their vindication. 
A statement of them amounts to proof. Other 
doctrines are so mysterious that statement and 
testimony are all the evidence we can have of 
their truthfulness. We can reason upon them 
no further than to observe that their statement 
is not internally a contradiction, and that the tes- 
timony which supports them is authoritative. 
But there are other truths in which the mysteri- 
ous and the intelligible are so interwoven that to 
an unpractised eye they may seem inseparable. 
Such a truth is that of regeneration. 

On the one hand, what God's working in the 
change of a sinner's heart is, as distinct from the 
effect of that working, in other words, what re- 
generation is, as distinct from conversion, who 
can tell ? We know scarcely more of the interior 
of the work of God in regenerating a soul than 



A TRANSPARENT CHANGE. 39 

we do of the mechanic power in creating a soul. 
The dynamics of the phenomenon elude all our 
philosophy. When Coleridge said, "By what 
manner of working God changes a soul from evil 
to good, how he impregnates the barren rock 
with gems and gold, is to the human mind an 
impenetrable mystery in all cases alike," he 
uttered only what every thoughtful mind feels. 
Thus our Lord taught to Mcodemus, The wind 
bloweth where it listeth, but the whence and the 
whither ye cannot tell ; so is every one that is 
born of the Spirit. But this is very far from 
affirming that the change itself, the result of 
God's working, is an enigma. A change of 
character, in itself considered, is one of the most 
intelligible of historic facts. It is like a trans- 
parency in the sun. It has the simplicity of con- 
trast. It is like a change from "yes" to "no," 
from "no "to "yes." 

Yet an inquiring mind sometimes suffers con- 
fusion from permitting the mysteriousness of the 
methods of regeneration to overspread the crys- 
talline character of the fact of conversion. The 
idea seems often to be entertained that this 
change itself is the great secret of Christian ex- 



40 THE NEW BIRTH. 

perience. An unregenerate mind cannot know 
what it is, any more than how it is. It appears, 
in the view of some minds, to bar the entrance 
to the church, like the watchword of a brother- 
hood, to which, from the outside, none can be 
initiated. Said one, in deep anguish, to a pas- 
tor, "I do not understand it. I do not compre- 
hend what I must do, or what I must be. I seem 
to myself to be doing all I can do. I am not 
conscious of hostility to God. I long to accept 
Christ and him only as my Saviour. What more 
is requisite to give me the peace which others 
feel, I do not know. The mystery of the thing 
shuts me in. Yet guilt weighs upon me like the 
hills. I feel as if I were buried alive." 

The state of mind expressed in this language 
is, in more respects than one, unnatural and un- 
scriptural. It is not an experience to which 
men are ever exhorted, or invited, or intimidated, 
in the Bible. But the point of its erroneousness 
which demands notice here is that of its confound- 
ing a change of heart with the divine methods 
which induce the change, and conceiving the one 
to be as enigmatical as the other. This is like 
confounding light with the voice which said, 



SIMPLICITY OF COXTEAST. 41 

"Let there be light." An inquiring sinner wrongs 
his own soul, and distrusts the Saviour's heart 
towards him, when he lingers in dumb anguish 
before the cross, hoping that he shall by and by 
understand the subject of conversion, and thus 
be enabled to become a Christian. To a sinner 
in the condition which I here imagine, there is 
nothing further to be understood in order to his 
salvation. There is no abyss of mystery to be 
fathomed. He has the truth, and the whole of 
it. How does our Lord address Mcodemus in 
this condition of purblind anxiety ? He chides 
him, as one would a child whose knowledge 
was needlessly beneath his years. Art thou 
a master in Israel, and knowest not these 
things ? 

These emblems of conversion, too - — what 
boldness of contrast pervades them all ! When 
we mean to express an idea with indubitable 
clearness, we seek the aid of contrasted images. 
We have no difficult}^ in distinguishing ice and 
fire. We never mistake the fall of thistle-down 
for the tread of an elephant. Nothing else re- 
veals midnight like a flash of lightning. So the 



42 THE NEW BIRTH. 

inspired mind paints the reality of a change of 
heart by depicting the two states of character 
between which the change occurs. It is from 
non-existence to being ; from a heart of stone to 
a heart of flesh ; from darkness to light ; from 
death to life ; from the empire of fiends to the 
kingdom of Christ. There is a meaning in such 
intense s t ymbois of the truth which is meant to 
be as intensely understood. An unregenerate 
mind can understand them. No other difference 
exists between regenerate and unregenerate per- 
ception of the truth in them than that which 
divides the knowledge of experience and the 
knowledge of theory on all other subjects. A 
sinner — an unregenerate sinner — a sinner who 
feels his own desert of hell — the chief of sin- 
ners — may come before God with none but 
reasonable fears, none but intelligent convictions, 
none but manly yearnings after peace, and in 
conscious helplessness may ask of God, " What 
shall I do to be saved ? " It is a reasonable in- 
quiry. God will not mock him in the answer. 
God will not say to him, "It is a mystery : it is 
the great secret of the universe. Thy destiny is 
unsearchable by thy dim eye. Be still, and know 



NO DOUBT IX GOD'S PROMISES, 43 

that I am God. Go thy way for this time ; when 
I have a convenient season I will call thee with 
an effectual calling. Go — go thy way." Sin- 
ners often treat the Saviour thus ; he is never so 
merciless to them. 

Certain couplets in a very precious hymn, ex- 
pressive of the sinner's last resolve, though they 
are true to a sinner's desponding experience, 
still are not worthy, because that experience is 
not worthy, of the riches and the freedom of 
God's grace. " I'll go to Jesus " : 

"111 to the gracious King approach 
Whose sceptre pardon gives ; 
Perhaps he will command my touch, 
And then the suppliant lives. 

11 Perhaps he will admit my plea, 
Perhaps will hear my prayer ! " 

There is no "perhaps" in God's promises. 
There is no stammering speech in God's invita- 
tions to an inquiring sinner. There is no hesi- 
tancy of love in God's offers of regenerating 
grace. - More honorable to the truth as it is in 
Jesus is the language of adoring trust : 



44 TEE NE TV BIR TH. 

" Just as I am — without one plea, 
But that thy blood was shecl for me. 
Just as I am — and waiting not. 
Just as I am — though tossed about 
With many a conflict. 
Just as I am — poor, wretched, blind. 
Just as, I am — thou wilt receive, 
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve. 
Because thy promise I believe ; 
O Lamb of God, I come." 

~V1. 

CONVERSION— A RADICAL CHANGE. 

The most characteristic feature in the scriptural 
view of the nature of conversion is, that, in dis- 
tinction from every variety of secondary change, 
it is the most radical change of which human 
character is susceptible. This conception of the 
radical nature of conversion is involved in all 
the scriptural statements of its necessity, and 
specially, in the scriptural metaphors by which 
it is symbolized. Indeed, the conception with 
which the inspired mind appears to have strug- 
gled most sturdily under the poverty of lan- 
guage, was this of the greatness of the change. 
What else is signified by the frequency with 



POVERTY OF LANGUAGE. 45 

which the inspired thought forsakes literal 
speech, aucl falls back upon such startling and 
unqualified metaphors as the creation of light ; 
the resurrection from the dead ; the mysterious 
and unknown change of birth ; and translation 
from the realms of the prince of the power of 
the air? Sane minds do ftot employ such em- 
blems of thought recklessly. We cannot sup- 
pose inspiration to prompt extravagant speech. 
This is but the sobriety of human dialect, 
crowded with and struggling to encompass the 
magnitude of divine thought. Scriptural utter- 
ances on this subject exhibit the same evidence 
of the conflict of truth with the feebleness of 
language — I had almost said the impatience of 
truth at the imbecility of language — which we 
find in the scriptural modes of representing the 
being and majesty of God. Truth, in the one 
case as in the other, seems to weigh down the 
most elastic tongue, and to exhaust the most 
voluminous vocabulary, and to search through 
the inventions of the most creative imagination, 
and to pass from one emblem to another, from 
one kingdom of resemblances to a second, till, 
by the mysteriousness of its drapery, we are 



46 THE NEW BIRTH. 

compelled to feel that the naked truth, as appre- 
ciated by the mind of God, surpasses our reach 
of expression. We can only exclaim, w Eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard it." We cannot define 
the greatness of the change in literal speech, 
otherwise than by pronouncing it the most pro- 
found, so far as we can know, that human nature 
can experience. 

What the birth of the body is to the conscious- 
ness of the mind that inhabits it we do not 
know; but, for its significance to the moral 
government of God over the mind, it cannot be 
so momentous a change as that mind's conver- 
sion. What disembodiment at death is to the 
experience of the spirit which thus goes out 
into an unexplored eternity we cannot conceive ; 
but, in respect of the solemnity of moral gov- 
ernment, it cannot be of such magnitude as the 
regeneration of that spirit. What the resurrec- 
tion of the body is to the history of the soul 
which has been again enrobed in it we cannot 
conjecture ; but, in its relation to the moral gov- 
ernment of that soul, it cannot be so elemental 
a change as that soul's conversion. Such phys- 
ical transformations and transitions can be hints 



REFORMATION XOT COXVERSION". 47 

only, and feeble hints, of the spiritual phenom- 
enon which transcends them. 



COUNTERFEITS OF CONVERSION. 

Let us then, for our practical instruction, ob- 
serve several mental and moral changes with 
which conversion is often confounded. Observe, 
briefly, that a change of external deportment is 
not the chief result of regeneration. No matter 
how pervasive that change may be, it can bear 
no comparison with religious conversion. When 
a man who has been addicted to sensual vice 
becomes a sober man, a chaste man, an industri- 
ous man, a good citizen, a kind father, brother, 
son, there is a notable change. It is a real 
change in character. It is a change for which a 
man deserves to be respected. But that is not 
a change which fills up the language of the Scrip- 
tures in designating the translation of a man 
into the kingdom of God. In other words, 
conversion and reformation are not synonymous. 

Again, no increase of seriousness of mental 
habit is synonymous with religious conversion. 
A young man often experiences, as the natural 



48 THE NEW BIRTH. 

result of expanding intellect, an increase of 
thousfhtf illness. When he was a child he thought 
as a child ; now he has put away childish things. 
Manly thought awakens manly sensibility. He 
acquires some sense of the reality of life as a 
conflict. A certain dignity of character is form- 
ed, which is as natural a growth of manhood 
upon the stock of youth as the addition of a 
cubit to the stature of an infant. It is indeed a 
valuable change, a change necessary to success 
in life, a change which will command respect, as 
it deserves respect ; but it is not conversion. 
No growth of earnestness is synonymous with 
that new birth which a soul experiences under 
the regenerating act of Gocl. 

Further, the abandonment of any single pas- 
sion does not constitute conversion. Such a 
change as this often occurs as the fruit of in- 
creasing years. Often the effect is to mellow a 
man's character, by substituting for a turbulent 
vice one more mild and comely, and yet a vice 
as deeply seated, as odious to God. Warren 
Hastings, after his ambition had burnt itself out 
in India, realized the favorite dream of his 
youth, by returning to spend his old age in the 



DEVELOPMENT NOT CONVERSION. 49 

homestead where his ancestors had lived in lux- 
ury. Here was a change, indeed. It must have 
involved in some sort a change in character. It 
was an abandonment of a fiery passion for a 
harmless indulgence of an aged man's love of 
repose. But this obviously is no such change as 
the word of God portrays by the emblem of the 
dawn of light on a benighted wanderer. 

Once more, conversion is not the development 
of character by natural germination in the heart. 
Character often undergoes a change by which 
qualities long concealed spring to light under a 
change of circumstance. Traits of generous 
manhood, the germs of which have been repress- 
ed, shoot up thriftily under improved discipline. 
Energies which have slumbered are roused by 
emergencies. No man knows the compass of 
his own nature till it has been distended by some 
great sorrow or great opportunity for achieve- 
ment. Such facts in life tempt us to self-con- 
ceit respecting the hidden nobleness of man. 
Much of the religion of literature is founded 
upon the idea of concealed virtue. A divinity 
is imagined to dwell within us, and to be await- 
ing only the incitement of occasion or the feli- 



50 THE NEW BIRTH. 

city of circumstance to develop itself in all that 
man should desire or respect in character. Yet 
no such change as this can be the complement 
of the scriptural conception of that revulsion of 
character which is no less than resurrection from 
the dead. 

What a satire on developed goodness in man 
is expressed in the tone of the Scriptures towards 
the best embodiment of the natural virtues! 
Breathe into Nature's good man the most come- 
ly of her graces ; educate in him the most re- 
fined of her sensibilities; develop in him the 
most magnanimous of her impulses ; fashion in 
him the most docile obedience to her teachings ; 
nurture in him the most elegant and placid of 
her tastes so that to the silken judgment of 
the world his character shall seem to be a para- 
gon of beauty, — "fair as a star when only one 
is shining in the sky"; yet if that fascinating 
beino- — that young man of whom it shall be 
said that Jesus, beholding him, loved him— has 
not been changed by the washing of regeneration 
and the renewing of the Holy Ghost, the hon- 
est eye of God sees him as a naked soul in 
bondage to the prince of the power of the air. 



CONTRASTS OF CHARACTER. 51 

A CONVERTED MAN — A NEW MAN. 

If the scriptural dialect on this subject means 
anything, it must indicate that conversion is a 
change which brings into existence a charac- 
ter which had no being before. Does not birth 
introduce to a new existence? Is life only a 
development of nonentity ? Is vitality a germi- 
nation of the life of a corpse ? Is light a growth 
of the midnight? Is the kingdom of God a 
superstructure upon the kingdom of Satan ? If 
development, growth, germination, are the 
things in which regeneration exhibits itself, we 
need no such emblems as these to express it. 
They are out of character and out of place. 
They are untruthful. The Scriptures are full of 
puerile extravagances and grimaces of diction. 
There is no propriety in recognizing two classes 
of mankind, such as the Scriptures separate by 
a gulf of fire. There are no such beings as 
sinners and saints, — enemies of God and friends 
of God, — natural men and spiritual men, — 
men who are in darkness and men who are in 
light, — men who are dead and men who are 
alive, — men who are in God's kingdom and 



52 THE NEW BIRTH. 

men who are in Satan's kingdom. These are 
unreal and unjust distinctions. Men are all of 
one class. They differ not in kind, but in de- 
gree of character. Here, then, we have a large 
and varied class of descriptions, uttered by the 
Spirit of God of men and to men, to which 
among men we find no counterpart in reality. 
But one half of the Bible is apposite to this 
world. Is this credible? The development, 
then, of an existing germ of holiness is not the 
scriptural idea of a change of heart. In other 
words, no process of self-culture can be equiva- 
lent in its fruits to the divine act of regenera- 
tion. 

CHARACTER UNDER A LAW Off PERPETUITY. 

The radical nature of conversion may be still 
further illustrated, by observing for a moment a 
principle which we often lose sight of in medita- 
tion upon this theme, but which lies at the bot- 
tom of all genuine notions of man as a subject 
of government. It is that character itself has 
fixedness. In the profound and ultimate sense 
in which we employ the term to indicate what a " 



CHARACTER PERPETUAL. 53 

soul is as a subject of moral government, char- 
acter has an element which approaches immuta- 
bility. Character, good or bad, once formed, 
tends to perpetuate itself. Once in it, a soul 
grows to it, and rises or sinks with it. The ne- 
cessity of creating a character is the most tran- 
scendent privilege, and at the same time the most 
appalling peril, of a moral being. The law of 
perpetuity is deep-laid in its very nature. By 
this law a moral being tends to be always what 
it has been and is. It is this which renders 
guilt so fearful. The law of guilt is to perpet- 
uate guilt. K Once a sinner, always a sinner," 
expresses the tendency of fallen mind. 

A truth is enveloped in those forms of expres- 
sion which eminent and holy men have often 
used to express depravity, when they have 
spoken of " a sinful nature " ; of " a depraved 
constitution " ; of a " helpless corruption" ; of 
" inability to repent." Much as these modes of 
expression are misconstrued, and much as they 
need qualification, there is still a truth in them. 
The use of them often indicates the struggle of 
a pious heart to express that truth. They are 
not without resemblance to some of the forms 



54 THE NEW BIRTH. 

of scriptural phraseology. They have their 
counterpart in the common usage of men in 
figurative speech. The truth they express is 
that of the natural fixedness of character in a 
sinner's heart. On the principle of the tendency 
of all character to perpetuate itself, a sinner's 
character is fixed. What he has once made it, 
its tendency is to be forever. That it will be 
forever, unless the power of God be interposed 
to reverse it. 

True, we do not conceive of this as an invin- 
cible tendency. It exists by no compulsory law. 
It asserts, therefore, no fatal authority. It is 
not a destiny. We do not reason upon the laws 
of character as we reason upon the laws of mat- 
ter, or even as we reason upon laws of intellect, 
as intellect only. Character, in the ultimate 
conception of it as a moral phenomenon, is 
unique. It is not a metal ; it is not a mind. 
It has laws of its own. Its laws are but the 
expression of the human mind which creates it, 
as the laws of light are an expression of the 
divine mind which created that ; as the laws of 
intellect are an expression of the infinite Intelli- 
gence in whose image it is made. When, there- 



CHARACTER PERPETUAL. 55 

fore, we apply the term rt nature " to character 
we cannot mean by it the same thing as when we 
speak of the " nature " of silver or the " nature " 
of memory. We must not confound the laws 
of character with the emblems of these laws, 
which we sometimes seek for in the laws of 
matter and in the organic laws of mind. Mat- 
ter and mind are God's creation. Human char- 
acter is man's creation. The creative power is 
as absolute in the one case as in the other. 
God rules finite character not by creation, but 
by government. He governs it as character, 
not as the wind or as the springs of the sea. 

Yet, after all, such is this imperial will of 
man, by which it is his privilege and his peril 
to be what he will, that a pressure towards 
immutability grows out of its nature and accu- 
mulates with time. Once bent one way, the 
spring coils itself that way forever. Once set 
in the chosen mould, the compound indurates 
into granite. Such is character in the ultimate 
notion of it. A creation by man's own act — a 
free creation — a creation which can be reversed 
— yet once in being, it tends to deathless being 
like that of God. It is a start on a journey 



56 THE FEW BIRTH. 

into eternity, in a direction from which, but by 
God's interposition, no traveller returns. It is 
in the light of such a conception of the awful 
immortality of character that we must judge of 
the radical nature of its change in conversion. 



THE SUPREME CHANGE. 

It remains, then, to observe, that there is but 
one change of character conceivable which shall 
meet all the peculiarities affirmed of religious 
conversion. It is the change from sin to holi- 
ness. It is a change from absolute sin to the 
first dawn of holiness in the soul. It is that 
unique change which has no parallel and no ad- 
equate similitude, in which an intelligent mind, 
a free mind, a self-acting mind, a mind which 
has intelligently, freely, of its own will, aban- 
doned God, is led for the first time in its moral 
history by Almighty grace to return, and give 
itself to God. For the first time, then, a sinner 
appreciates God . For the first time he loves God. 
For the first time he chooses God. For the first 
time he enjoys God. For the first time he is 
born of God. For the first time his life is hid 



THE SUP BE ME CHANGE. 57 

with Christ in God. God, God, God, is the 
one being to whom his soul mounts up, and" in 
whom he enters into rest. He may be flooded 
with joy unspeakable, because he is engulfed 
in the blessedness of God. 




CHAPTEE II. 

EEGENERATION — THE WORK OF GOD. 

N unperverted mind will approach rev- 
Ff\s erently any revelation of God in the 
destiny of man. The conception of an 
invisible Power has itself a fascination 
for a finite mind. It is not strange that the 
Wind should have been deified in pagan theol- 
ogy. Little as a human mind can know of a 
power which the eye has never seen, yet when 
dependence upon such a power reaches out to 
cover everything in the future which renders 
immortality attractive, a sense of mingled gran- 
deur and suspense is awakened, which holds the 
mind fast, in the attitude of a subdued and anx- 
ious learner. Metaphysical relations of truth in 
such connections are often unwelcome. Some- 
times, indeed, they seem unnatural. The instinct 
of a docile spirit is to approach such truths as ob- 
jects of faith, rather than as subjects of analysis. 

58 



HOLINESS NOT AN INSTINCT. 59 

To no theme is such a spirit more becoming 
than to the revealed fact that the change of a 
human heart is the work of God. 



i. 



WHAT DO WE MEAN BY DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY IN 
BEGENERA TIONl 



We shall reach the most vital aspects of this 
subject most directly by first defining to our- 
selves, briefly, what we mean when we ascribe 
the change of a man's heart to Divine Power. 
This doctrine may be considered as affirming 
several truths. 

In the first place, it affirms that a human soul 
never changes its own character from sin to holi- 
ness through the involuntary development of its 
own sensibilities. Holiness cannot so exist in 
emotive forms as to spring up impulsively in a 
heart which is unconscious of will to produce it. 
Holiness is not an instinct. It does not grow 
automatically out of the make of the soul, as, 
with proper incitements, compassion, gratitude, 
reverence, may do. The heart of man, in rela- 
tion to the causes of rectitude within it, is not 



60 THE NEW BIKTH. 

like a harp, which to utter its voices needs only 
to be hung in the wind. 

The doctrine we are to consider further affirms 
that man never turns from sin to holiness by an 
effort of his own will, independent of supernat- 
ural Power. This is something more than the 
assertion often made, "that man cannot change 
his own affections by direct volition." The ina- 
bility involved in this latter assertion is not the 
fruit of depravity. The grace of God does not 
remove it. It lies in the constitution of mind, 
regenerate or unregenerate. A saint cannot, 
more than a sinner, love God by resolving "I 
will love God." Either might as reasonably re- 
solve : " I will see this symphony of Beethoven ; 
I will hear the beauty of Loch Lomond." The 
blind man had more of reason in his philosophy 
when he pronounced the color of scarlet to be 
like the sound of a trumpet. 

The doctrine of man's dependence upon God 
for regeneration affirms nothing respecting such 
psychological possibilities of change. It affirms 
that man never turns from sin to holiness by any 
effort, direct or indirect, of his own will, unin- 
fluenced by supernatural power. We do not 
affirm that he cannot do this, except in the figu- 



SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD. 61 

rative sense iu which a mother cannot hate her 
infant; a compassionate man cannot bear the 
sight of a victim on the rack ; a miser cannot 
part with his gold ; Joseph's brethren could not 
speak peaceably unto him; God cannot lie. In 
the literal sense of both scientific and popular 
speech, a sinner can, but will not, cease to be a 
sinner without the intervention of Divine Power. 

Consistently with this view, the doctrine of 
Divine agency in regeneration also affirms that 
the unaided force of truth does not suffice to per- 
suade the human soul from sin to holiness. Here 
also we affirm only the fact of experience. The 
doctrine does not degrade the dignity of truth. 
It does not deny the intrinsic power of truth 
over mind as mind, regenerate or unregenerate. 
It does not refuse to discern in truth a tendency 
to convert a soul, and in the soul a tendency to 
yield to truth. It only affirms the fact of real 
life, that these tendencies are overborne. The 
suasive working of truth, when not energized by 
the grace of God, is a failure. 

In this view is involved a subsidiary fact, — 
that all human instrumentalities and expedients 
by which truth is intensified, and so made appre- 
ciable by human sensibilities, are powerless to 



62 TEE NEW BIRTH. 

change the heart. Authority, sympathy, reason- 
ing, eloquence, the magnetism of person, and 
whatever else enters into the mystery of persua- 
sion, in which mind impels mind by the enginery 
of speech, may change well-nigh everything in 
man except his character. That, these auxil- 
iaries to truth all fall short of, in their profound- 
est reach. 

Let it be observed, then, once more, that when 
we ascribe to God the change which takes place 
in regeneration, we mean that, over and above 
all natural tendencies and finite agencies, God 
performs an act of sovereign power in every 
change of character from sin to holiness. What 
that act is, what that power is, other than as 
characterized by their effects, the Scriptures do 
not teach, and we need not affirm. The psycho- 
logical process of which moral conversion is the 
consequence is at best a theme of philosophical 
conjecture. Belief respecting it is no necessary 
part of faith in tbe biblical doctrine of regenera- 
tion. Beyond a declaration of the fact, we are 
not called upon to affirm or deny. 



REGENERATION UNIQUE. 63 

n. 

REGENERATION— A SOLITARY DISCLOSURE OF GOD. 

Our conception of the fact of divine agency in 
regeneration may be sharpened, however, and 
we may be protected against some confusion of 
faith, if we observe that, so far as we know, the 
act of renewing the human heart is an entirely 
unique disclosure of God. We know of nothing 
else like it in the history of the universe. We 
call it " creation." We pray with the Psalmist, 
" Create in me a clean heart ! " Yet it is not an 
act of physical omnipotence, like that which cre- 
ates an oak. We denominate this mysterious 
transformation " a new birth." Yet we should 
.deserve the rebuke which our Lord gave to Nic- 
odemus, if we should discern in the act such an 
expression of omnipotence as that which creates 
a soul. We picture this divine renewal as a 
"change of heart." We pray that the stony 
heart may be taken and the heart of flesh given. 
But ours would be a childish dream of heaven, 
if we should look for such a miracle of power as 
God wrought in the creation of the first woman. 
God cannot create a human character as he ere- 



64 THE NEW BIRTH. 

ates the being who sustains that character. God 
could not have created Adam's character as he 
created Adam. We speak loosely when we say 
in our creeds "man was created holy." So, in- 
finite sovereignty could not have originated the 
piety of the beloved disciple as it summoned into 
being the fisherman of Galilee. We portray this 
unspeakable change as a " resurrection." We cry 
out in our despair, " Who shall deliver us from 
the body of this death ? " But our despair must 
be eternal, if we have no other hope than such 
an act of Deity as the raising of Lazarus. The 
dry bones which Ezekiel saw were in vision only. 
So far as we know the history of God's working, 
regeneration stands alone. Divine forces in na- 
ture — even divine forces above nature, yet 
acting upon things material — present no paral- 
lels to it. 

Consequently the emblems which we derive 
from the material and the sentient world to ex- 
press the phenomenon of regeneration are only 
emblems. They are not kindred facts. They 
do not belong to the same plane of divine effi- 
ciency. They are not definitions, they are picto- 
rial descriptions, of the new birth. The new birth 



REGENERATION UNIQUE. 65 

transcends them, as matter sentient transcends 
matter inert ; as intelligence transcends both ; 
and as character transcends all organism of mat- 
ter or mind. We shall often conceive most 
truthfully of such a phenomenon by throwing 
our minds back of the symbols devised for its 
expression. As a disclosure of God, it is at once 
original, solitary, and ultimate. Nothing like 
it, so far as our knowledge extends, has pre- 
ceded, or will follow, the earthly history of man. 
Nothing like it in the universe, so far as reveal- 
ed to us, lies outside of the moral experience of 
the human soul. Such a phenomenon, and the 
primary Cause of it, cannot be exhaustively 
expressed by any similitude. They must be de- 
scribed by results, rather than defined by analy- 
sis. To whom will ye liken God? 

It may aid us further to conceive of the regen- 
erating act as a unique disclosure of God's power, 
if we recall the fact that in like manner we con- 
ceive of the atonement as a solitary device of his 
moral government. Thus, also, we look upon 
the incarnation as an unparalleled expression of 
the personality of Godhead. It would be as 
truthful to confound these with the emblems by 



66 THE NEW BIRTH. 

which we struggle with our poverty of speech to 
express them, as it is to confound the regener- 
ating power, as is sometimes done, with creative 
power, or preserving power, or the power of 
miracle, or any other variety of executive energy 
emanating from the Will of God. 

Yet if we observe faithfully the actual work- 
ing of God in regeneration, and judge the cause 
by its effects, we are not left without some prac- 
tical hints of its nature. 

Thus we approximate a radical idea of it when 
we discover it to be a moral, as distinct from a 
physical, power. We have a valuable notion of 
it, when we term it persuasive, as distinct from 
compulsory, in its operation. We derive fear- 
ful admonition from the fact that it is resistible, 
not invincible, by the subjects of it. Yet we 
rest in hope when we know that it is certain in 
its working, and sure of its end ; not capricious, 
not chimerical. And do we not revere the su- 
pernatural majesty of it when we look up to the 
height of the solitude in which it works, without 
equal and without adequate symbol among all 
the revelations made to us of Infinite Mind ? 



BIBLICAL PROOF. 67 



m. 



BIBLICAL VIEW OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN THE NEW 
BIRTH. 

The proof of the fact of Divine Agency in re- 
generation is derived chiefly from the Word of 
God. An analysis of a single text may serve as 
a specimen of the declarative passages in which 
this truth is taught. 

"To as many as received him, to them gave he 
power to become the sons of God ; which were 
born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, 
nor of the will of man, but of God." We can- 
not press to the quick the significance of the word 
" power " here. Yet we need not shrink from it 
through fear of its implication against human 
freedom. We must concede, however, to an ob- 
jector against the whole conception of a new 
birth, that there is here an infelicity, though not 
necessarily an inaccuracy, in our English ver- 
sion. "Prerogative" is the idea which the word 
in its connection requires, rather than " ability " 
" Privilege " it is rendered in the margin of our 
larger Bibles. "To them assigned he the privi- 
lege of being the sons of God." But this is not 



68 THE NEW BIRTH. 

the vital part of the passage in respect to the 
truth before us. That appears in the sequel : 
" Which were born not of blood, nor of the will 
of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." 
That is, this new birth, which entitles men the 
sons of God, is not the fruit of ancestral dignity. 
It is not consequent upon the laws of natural 
generation. It is not the product of human in- 
fluence. It is a work of God. Language could 
not be more explicit. 

A most interesting feature of the scriptural 
method of teaching this truth is seen in the fact 
that no timidity is exhibited by inspired minds 
in their guardianship of it. They do not seem 
to fear that a change of heart will not be ascribed 
to God by those who experience that change. 
The passages are not numerous in which the 
central point of significance is a contrast of 
Divine with human power. Occasionally, in- 
deed, we read of such monitory words as these : 
"By grace ye are saved, through faith, and that 
not of yourselves — it is the gift of God " ; and 
such as these : " I have planted and Apollos 
watered, but God gave the increase ; so then 
neither is he that planteth anything, nor he that 
watereth, but God." 



BIBLICAL PROOF. C9 

Such, however, is not the general mood of 
inspiration on this subject. More frequently 
than otherwise the fact of the divinity of regen- 
eration is inserted^ as if by the by ; not as in- 
trinsically inferior, yet as relatively subordinate, 
in the structure of the inspired thought. Thus, 
we are told that " God hath quickened us to- 
gether with Christ " ; the dignity of association 
with Christ being the gleaming point in the lan- 
guage. We are taught that " as many as are led 
by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God " ; 
with emphasis not chiefly on the guidance of the 
Holy Spirit, but upon the dignity of the adop- 
tion. We are admonished, " God hath, from 
the beginning, chosen you to salvation, through 
the sanctification of the Holy Ghost ; " in which 
not so much the divinity of the power as the 
eternity of the election is the focal thought. 
We are reminded, " Ye are washed, ye are 
sanctified by the Spirit of our God " ; and not 
so much the agency of the change, as the con- 
trast it has created with " thieves and drunkards 
and extortioners," marks the climax of impres- 
sion. We hear Paul exclaiming, " What is the 
exceeding greatness of the power of God to 



70 THE NEW BIRTH. 

usward who believe " ; not the bald fact that it 
is the power of God, but the unutterable mag- 
nitude of that power is the point of concentra- 
tion. 

Thus the inspired mind speaks at its ease of 
the fact of Divine working in regeneration, as 
if it were a truth which an experience of the 
change, or even an admission of the necessity 
of the change, would draw after it as an inev- 
itable corollary. Inspiration does not pet the 
doctrine, nor prop the doctrine, nor seem to 
tremble for the honor of the doctrine. It 
treats the doctrine more regally. By collat- 
eral mention of it, by calm assumption of it, 
by cool implications of it, by unpremeditated 
allusions to it, and by delicate hints of it, the 
inspired mind treats it as if it were a truth of 
which an intimation is equivalent to a demon- 
stration ; a truth which, once insinuated into 
the mind through crevices of thought, will be 
like light to the universe. It will assert itself. 
It will prove itself. It will vindicate its own 
dignity, and flood all things else with its super- 
abounding radiance. Such is the temper of the 
faith in this doctrine which the inspired writers 






EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 71 

would create in a believing soul. Theirs is a 
placid faith, an intrepid faith, an unsuspicious 
faith; a faith never wavering in itself, never 
tremulous over the treasure it guards ; a faith 
which sees God so intensely in the wonders of 
his grace, that to its clear, calm eye this world 
seems like a w drop of water resting in the hol- 
low of Jehovah's hand." 



IV. 



EXPERIENCE OF THE NEW BIRTH SUGGESTIVE OF A 
SUPERNATURAL CAUSE. 

We see in the material world much which is 
immediately suggestive to us of the presence of 
God. We obtain our first vivid conceptions of 
Divine power from the evidences of that power 
in natural phenomena, over which we do not 
consciously pause to elaborate the conviction of 
God's working. We do not educe it from a 
nice balancing of probabilities. We see it; it 
forces itself upon us. We know it ; it over- 
powers our consciousness of all speculative pro- 
cesses. We can only look on in silent awe 
while the wonderful perfections of God unfold 



72 THE NEW BIRTH. 

themselves. Do we not thus see God in a cata- 
ract, in a tempest, in the lightning, in the ocean? 
Do we not thus discern his hand in the heavens, 
which are the work of his fingers ? Do we not 
thus behold the light of his countenance in the 
dawn of morning? Do we not thus hear the 
sound of his footfall when night settles on the 
world ? To a believing spirit these phenomena 
are all immediately suggestive of God. 

Our present inquiry, then, is : Do we discover 
in the developments of the human soul in that 
process of experience of which conversion is the 
exponent any similar tokens of God's agency? 
Do we perceive anything which impels us to 
feel, as by intuition, that we are witnessing an 
act of God ? 

That every instance of conversion is of this 
electric character, we cannot affirm. Not every 
work of God in the natural world is such. God 
acts in the formation of a vein of anthracite as 
efficiently as in the creation of the Himalayas. 
Science teaches us that the forces antecedent in 
the one case were as elemental and convulsive 
as those in the other. So in the spiritual world, 
the change of a soul in regeneration may be 



CONVERSION OF PAUL. 73 

wrought by processes which conceal themselves 
from all eyes but that of Him w T ho sees where is 
the vein for silver and the place for gold. Yet 
to the wisdom of a later world those processes 
shall be seen to have been as formative and as 
revolutionary as any that have racked other 
natures with tumultuous conversion. 

But some phenomena are observable in the 
experience of some minds which, assuming the 
scriptural theory of regeneration as a possible 
fact, are immediate tokens of the presence and 
the power of God. To some of these let us 
direct our thoughts. 

GOD IS SOMETIMES SUGGESTED BY THE MANNER OP 
CONVERSION. 

Of this, illustration will be more convincing 
than abstract proof. Take, for example, the 
conversion of the Apostle Paul. Look at it as 
a fact in the history of mind. Set aside, as ir- 
relevant to the object before us, whatever was 
miraculous in the events of that journey to 
Damascus. Make no account of the supernat- 
ural light, the voice from heaven, the shock of 
blindness. Consider not the means, but the 



74 TEE NEW BIRTH. 

manner, of that change in the man. Mark its 
impetuosity. Note the instantaneousness of 
that arrest of passion. It is like a torrent fro- 
zen in mid-air. Observe the revulsion of feel- 
ing. Threatening and slaughter give place to 
convictions of sin. Malignity is supplanted by 
prayer. Perceive the revolution of character in 
that instant of trembling and astonishment. 
Call it regeneration, conversion, new birth, or 
by titles more comely to philosophic taste ; call 
it what you will, it is a change of character. 
The Pharisee becomes a penitent. The perse- 
cutor becomes a Christian. The murderer be- 
comes a saint. For aught that appears in the 
narrative, the change is almost like a flash of 
lightning. How brief the colloquy which pro- 
claims the whole of it ! " Who art thou, Lord ? " 
"I am Jesus." "Lord, what wilt thou have me 
to do ? " We do not know that mind can move 
more rapidly than this in such a juncture of its 
history, and yet move intelligently. Then put 
together the two lives of the man — his life 
before, and his life after, this convulsive crisis. 
Saul and Paul join hands over this invisible gulf, 
as over the river of death — the same being, yet 



PAUL A REPRESENTATIVE. 75 

two different men. His character has experi- 
enced a change like the transmutation of metals. 
Take these as facts of sober mental histoiy, and 
do they not seem to speak the presence of a 
supernatural Power ? If the world could come 
to that ninth chapter of the Acts as to a modern 
discovery in psychology, philosophic systems 
would grow T out of it ; all futile in explanation 
of the process, but all confessing the reality and 
the divinity of the thing. 

Yet this passage in the life of one soul is a 
representative of a class of changes of religious 
character, in which it is unphilosophical not to 
see the working of Divine power within the en- 
closure of finite being. Such a passage in the 
life of a soul was the conversion of Luther. 
Such also was that of John Bunyan and of 
Gilbert Tennent. Such was that of the late 
Eev. Dr. TTilson of Philadelphia, who was sud- 
denly prostrated under conviction of sin, through 
a sense of the Divine goodness in the failure of 
his pistol to fell his antagonist in an assault. 
The mental experiences of such men, considered 
merely as data of mental science, deserve a con- 
sideration which they do not often receive. 



76 THE NEW BIRTH, 

The world, from the beginning until now, has 
inferred the presence of supernal agencies in 
the mental changes of men, from less conclusive 
evidences than those furnished by such conver- 
sions as these. Socrates believed — and philos- 
ophy has revered him for the faith — that an 
invisible Spirit swayed his thought, and he be- 
lieved it on less evidence than this. Napoleon 
believed — and poetry has discovered piety in 
the faith — that supernatural power intervened 
in his destiny ; and he believed it on less evi- 
dence than this. It has passed into the cant of 
literature to ascribe inspiration, even divinity, 
to great minds on infinitely less evidence than 
this. 

So have we seen and heard in our own clay, 
and among men and women whose names will 
never be heralded in biographies, evidences of a 
power working in their souls, which suggests to 
us irresistibly the presence of God. We have 
seen great suddenness of conviction, — a blas- 
phemer has been struck down by a sense of 
guilt, as if by a bolt of fire, like that which fell 
at Luther's feet. "We have known a velocity of 
movement from conviction to penitence which 






MAXXZB OF CONVERSION. 77 

has seemed like the speed of light. ~\Ye have 
learned that such processes of conviction and 
conversion have tallied with the pleadings of 
intercessory prayer. Prayer has seemed to be 
prescient of history. We must abandon the 
laws of natural association if, with the scrip- 
tural doctrine of regeneration in the back- 
ground, we do not see in such changes a 
work of God. It is not seldom that unbelief 
is avred into silence by them, even when they 
are still distasteful to its culture. The belief is 
thrust upon the incredulous observer, — he can- 
not resist it : — " This is not the work of man ; 
this is not hypocrisy ; it is not enthusiasm ; it 
is no fiction of a mind fuming with effervescent 
sympathy ; it is no nightmare of one frantic 
through fear of death : this is a work of God ; 
I. can no more question it than I can question 
the power of a Creator, if I see the solid globe 
quivering and gaping in the throes of an earth- 
quake. " 



78 THE NEW BIRTH. 



GOD IS SOMETIMES SUGGESTED BY THE MAGNITUDE OF 
CONVERSION. 

John Foster has observed the evidence of 
Almighty Power in the awakening of intellect 
in those who are converted in gross ignorance. 
He says : w It is striking to observe how the 
rigid soul seems to soften and grow warm, and 
expand and quiver with life. With the new 
energy infused, it struggles to work itself into 
freedom from the wretched contortion in which 
it has so long been fixed, as by the spell of 
some infernal magic. It is filled with a dis- 
tressed and indignant emotion at its own igno- 
rance ; actuated with a restless earnestness to 
be informed ; acquiring an unwonted pliancy of 
its faculties to thought. We have known in- 
stances in which the intellectual change has been 
so conspicuous, that even an infidel observer 
must have forfeited all claim to be a man of 
sense if he would not acknowledge : c This, 
which you call divine grace, whatever it really 
be, is the strangest awakener of faculties, after 
all."' 

But what is such intellectual awakening in 



CONVERSION' OF OUTCASTS. 79 

comparison with the moral regeneration which 
underlies it ! When a man who has spent half 
a lifetime in the dens of vice comes forth to sit 
as a meek disciple at the Lord's table ; when 
it is said of a scoffer, " Behold he prayeth " ; 
when we hear a thief crying " Lord remember 
me " ; when a man whose name has been the 
synonym of vileness, and whose brutality cities 
have borne as a curse upon their youth, becomes 
a preacher of Christ ; when one whom the moral 
sense of the world has doomed as an outcast, 
"lost" as no other sinner on earth can be, 
from whom the virtuous have turned aside in 
the street lest they should but touch the hem of 
her garment, — when such a one is seen coming 
to Jesus, and standing behind him at his feet,' 
weeping, and bathing them with her tears and 
wiping them with the hair of her head, till he 
who knew no sin turns and says, "Her sins, 
which are many, are forgiven, for she loved 
much," — how is it possible not to discern that 
God who doeth wonders ? 

Those early Christians of Borne and Corinth, 
— had they no evidence of God's power in re- 
generation, when an apostle enumerated to them 



80 THE NEW BI11TH. 

the loathsome catalogue of crimes by which 
Paganism had degraded humanity, and then 
added, "such also were some of you." Had 
such a man as Augustine no reason for the faith 
which was in him, that his " evil and abominable 
youth," as he affirms, was transformed by "thy 
grace only, O Lord, thy grace only"? Was 
this a visionary faith to such a man as Colonel 
James Gardiner? Who shall say that John 
Newton took the name of God in vain, in as- 
cribing to Divine power that change in his heart 
which took him from the helm of a slave-ship, 
and taught him to compose, for all succeeding 
ages, such a hymn as that commencing "One 
there is above all others " ? Had a man with 
such a history no right to speak from his own 
experience of God's power in his soul, when he 
taught us to sing, — 

" Sweet was the time when first I felt 
The Saviour's pardoning blood. " ? 

Had he no right to sing as he did, — 

" Amazing grace, — how sweet the sound ! — 
That saved a wretch like me ! " 



GOD Itf REWVALS. 81 

GOD IS SUGGESTED BY THE PHENOMENA OF REVIVALS. 

Still another form of this illustrative evidence 
of Divine agency in regeneration appears in its 
diffusiveness to large numbers simultaneously. 
Scarcely can a more memorable exhibition of 
God be found than that presented by a revival 
of religion. Historians seldom take note of so 
obscure an event ; yet if the secret connections 
of revivals with the destiny of nations could be 
disclosed, they would appear to be more critical 
evolutions of history than the Gothic invasions. 
A volume has been compiled, narrating the de- 
cisive battles of the world . But more signifi- 
cant than this, and probing deeper the .Divine 
government of the world, would be the history 
of revivals. 

Our sense of the reality of revivals as reve- 
lations of God is apt to be impaired by several 
causes. In certain periods their frequency so 
familiarizes our minds with them that they im- 
press us as little as the tides. At other times 
the very vastness of their extent overpowers our 
ability to associate them with definite thoughts 
of God. It is our weakness, that in spiritual 



82 TEE NEW BIRTH. 

things our vision is often more intense in the 
specific and the minute, than in the multifarious 
and the immeasurable, disclosures of his work- 
ing. Does not a single star in the sky some- 
times move us more sensibly than the whole 
spangled heavens, roofing the world over? So 
the conversion of one soul may seem to bring 
us nearer to the Infinite Mind than days of pen- 
tecost. Perhaps, more than all else, the path- 
ological infirmities and the moral perversions, 
with which human nature defaces God's work 
in wide-spread revivals, fascinate our gaze as 
we look on. Our vision grows distorted. We 
cease to discern between good and evil. We 
become like men who are color-blind. We are 
unconscious that it is our own disease which 
dims our eye. 

But to any sane mind whose vision faith has 
sharpened, so that it can see truth luminous 
through murky surroundings, a revival of reli- 
gion will appear to be one of the most godlike 
events in history. Regarded as an achievement 
of power only, to be made the theme of philo- 
sophical inquiry, it can be traced to no human 
forces. Viewed as an index of prophecy, it is 



GOD IK REVIVALS. 83 

often one of the night-signals of this world's 
march heavenward. 

That swaying of a nation to and fro by secret 
agency, — by a Power which no man sees, and 
no man hears, and no man can explain ; of 
which no man can tell whence it comes or 
whither it goes, yet a Power which every man 
feels ; and which singles out from the innumer- 
able throng this one and that one, by laws of 
selection which no man can define, till scores 
grow to hundreds, and hundreds to thousands, 
and an army of the elect gathers at the bidding 
of this voiceless One, — what mystery of faith 
could invite such incredulity as that involved in 
denying to such a phenomenon the will of God ? 
If men would but apply to the history of revi- 
vals the same laws of cause and effect which 
they adopt in reasoning upon the origin of the 
Crusades, no man, with the scriptural idea of 
regeneration as an hypothesis in his mind, could 
withstand the evidence of Almighty Power in 
any revival which has commanded the faith of 
the church as a work of the Holy Ghost. We 
may sum up the testimony of such revivals, 
taken in the mass with all their perversions, in 



84 THE NEW BIRTH. 

the confession made by many irreligious men 
of the last century, who had lived through the 
w Great Awakening" of that period, and by 
many also who have recently watched the phe- 
nomena of the " Year of Grace " in Ireland, 
that the events of which they had been eye- 
witnesses were inexplicable by any psycholog- 
ical laws which should not recognize the pres- 
ence and the direct working of God in the souls 
of men. 



GOD IS SUGGESTED BY UNCONSCIOUS CONVERSION. 

A certain class of facts, which indeed are ex- 
ceptional in their character, are yet among the 
signal exhibitions of God in Christian expe- 
rience. I allude to certain abnormal growths 
of Christian life which are unproductive of 
Christian joy. To those who are familiar, to 
any large extent, with unwritten Christian bi- 
ography, this will suggest a distinct and most 
instructive class of examples of regenerate ex- 
perience. They utter unconscious testimony to 
the working of Him whose glory it is to conceal 
a thing. 



UNCONSCIOUS CONVERSION. 85 

When certain varieties of temperament come 
under the sway of regenerating grace they shrink 
instinctively from faith, even from hope, that the 
life of God may have been imparted to such as 
they. The credibility of experience in these 
cases is marred by no overweening self-confi- 
dence. The most fastidious sceptic is not here 
repelled by the assumptions of haughty sanc- 
tity. No honest lip can curl in contempt of 
the inconsistency of character with profession. 
These Christians make no professions. They 
express no assurance. They enjoy little or no 
hope for themselves. The inner life of some 
of them is as the valley of the shadow of death. 
Yet who that knows anything of unrecorded 
Christian history does not recall some from this 
group of crushed spirits, who have exhibited to 
all spectators an overwhelming testimony to the 
working within them of Infinite Power ? They 
have seemed to exhale the evidence of God's 
indwelling. They have commanded from others 
a confidence which they dared not whisper to 
themselves. They have been as unconscious as 
infancy of the beauty of the Divine life they 
expressed. They wist not that their faces 



86 THE NEW BIRTH. 

shone. Men stand in awe of such characters, 
and gather around them to make obeisance to 
them. God hath indeed chosen these weak 
things to confound the wise. Sceptics are 
dumb in their presence ; rude men are mel- 
lowed ; and strong men bow themselves at the 
glance of their meek eye. They make us weep 
when they speak of God's dealings with them. 
Their silence is more eloquent than speech. 
n I saw under the altar the souls of them that 
were slain for the word of God, and for the 
testimony which they held." In emergencies 
of our mental life do we not sometimes turn to 
these voiceless witnesses for refuge ? Does not 
our coarser faith lean upon them with a firmer 
trust than upon strong men armed, and mighty 
men of valor? We are not careful at such 
times to inquire whether the emotions which 
overwhelm us can be justified by this world's 
wisdom. We do not care whether they can be 
accounted for by a syllogism. Something within 
us assures us that in communing with such be- 
ings we hold converse with Him whose temple 
they are. We bid kings and counsellors of the 
earth to fall back to the right and the left, and 



EXPERIENCE OF COWPEIl. 87 

let these few choice spirits go up before us. 
We follow those who have been chosen kings 
and priests unto God. 

This unconscious testimony to the Divine in- 
dwelling occasionally exhibits itself in strange 
— yes, in fearful — forms; for it is contrasted 
with strange and fearful forms of suffering. I 
can never listen to the singing of some of the 
hymns of Cowper, without a thrill of reverence 
for the grace of God which could work so 
mightily in a diseased soul. Some of Cow- 
per's most affecting lyrics, to which millions of 
Christian hearts have turned lovingly, as to the 
most truthful expression of their own experi- 
ence which they have ever found, except in the 
Psalms of David, were composed during those 
eleven years in which, as he tells us, not a soli- 
tary moment of hope of his own salvation ever 
cheered his soul. By those rivers of Babylon 
he sat down and wept; and his wailings are 
heard in thousands of the sanctuaries of Zion to 
this day. Oh, mystery of grace, — that regen- 
erating love should thus gleam out, and make 
radiant the path of sympathizing beholders, 
when not a ray of it could find ingress to the 



88 THE NEW BIRTH. 

bleared and swollen eye of the unconscious 
believer ! 

May we venture to probe the mystery ? Can 
it be the object of such a phenomenon to give 
to the universe a monument of God's triumph 
over Satan, in a conflict the severity of which 
submerges weak human nature to depths which 
light cannot pierce ? In the shock and struggle 
of that warfare, in which the supremacy over 
man's soul is contested by unseen belligerents, 
may it not be that God sometimes suspends the 
hiding of his power, and lays out the forces of 
his will in majesty which the human conscious- 
ness cannot bear to look upon ? Shall man see 
God in such conflicts and live ? But the reflex 
influence of such experience upon the usefulness 
of the believer is more intelligible. I have 
heard it said by one, the fragrance of whose 
memory yet fills our New England churches, 
that " no man could be qualified to write a com- 
mentary on the Psalms of David who had not 
known some great sorrow." So, when God re- 
generates a chosen one who is to become dear 
to the hearts of many generations, the secret 
method of grace sometimes is to work out the 



EXPERIENCE OF COWPEE. 89 

change by processes which shall disclose its re- 
ality to all minds but his. To him the volume 
is sealed until the time of the end. Yet his 
tremulous fingers have written it that the Scrip- 
tures might be fulfilled : w I will lead the blind 
by a way they knew not ; I have surnamed thee, 
though thou hast not known me." 

Even upon the insane experience of such a 
soul we may reasonably found our faith in the 
divinity of the Power which dwells in it. We 
turn from the testimony of such a one in his 
despair, to his testimony as we doubt not he 
rehearses it to awe-struck angels. "Poor Cow- 
per," as thy friends used to call thee, — "our 
guide, our teacher, our brother," rather would 
we name thee, — what thinkest thou now of 
God's dealings with thy soul ? Dost thou not 
now understand those mysterious eleven years ? 
Was it not worth eleven years of sorrow to be 
thus enabled to express some of the experiences 
of God's people in all coming time? Was it 
not worth eleven years of conflict to be thus 
disciplined as the witness of God to unborn 
millions among whom this shall be told as a 
memorial of thee? Was it not worth eleven 



90 THE NEW BIRTH. 

years of bondage to the powers of darkness to 
be thus led to the composition of one such song 
of Zion as that in which thou hast taught us that 
"God moves in a mysterious way"? Was it 
not worth eleven years of despair to be thus 
moved by the throes of thine own anguish to 
assure all other believers, as thou hast done, 
that " There is a fountain filled with blood " ? 
Dost thou not now see that when thou didst say 
for our comfort, — 

" Then, in a nobler, sweeter song, 
I'll sing thy power to save," 

thou didst speak words of unconscious prophecy ? 



v. 



MORAL USES OF THE DOCTRINE OF SUPERNATURAL 
RE GENERA TION. 

The doctrine of Divine agency in regenera- 
tion is fruitful of practical results. 

Of these one of the most obvious is a dis- 
closure of 

THE PROFOUND NATURE OF DEPRAVITY. 

Evil is radically crafty. The serpent was 



NATURE OF DEPRAVITY. 91 

more subtile than any beast of the field. We 
get even from an experience of sin no such pro- 
found notion of it, as we derive from the means 
and powers necessary to eradicate it. So we 
approximate the radical idea of depravity most 
nearly, through this revelation of God's work in 
the new birth. 

To discern the vital truth here, unconfounded 
by fictitious alleviations, we need to guard our 
thoughts against the conception of a depravity 
which is not guilt. In the subject of a moral 
government guilt and depravity are equivalents. 
Depravity, as has been shown in a previous 
chapter, in any sense of it which makes it an 
object of moral displeasure, is character; noth- 
ing less, nothing more. And depraved char- 
acter is guilt. The need of a work of God to 
change the heart suggests, therefore, the depth 
of this depravity of character which the com- 
mon sense of men recognizes, and the common 
conscience condemns as guilt. The necessity in 
question is proof of the exceeding sinfulness of 
sin. It denounces no involuntary corruption; 
it permits no such bimal of our sense of per- 
sonality. It demands no conviction of sin for 



92 THE NEW BIRTH. 

constitutional degeneracy; it inflicts no such 
suffocation upon conscience. The soul that sin- 
neth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the 
iniquity of the father. 

The necessity of creating extinguished fac- 
ulties would be a light matter in comparison 
with that which actually presses upon an unre- 
generate soul. The real emergency of the case 
probes deeper. It reaches down, down, to the 
lowest depths of conscience, where such ideas 
as right, wrong, guilt, remorse, punishment, 
pardon, are the elements ; down below theo- 
ries of the make of the soul as a creature of 
power, below the stock it comes from as a pris- 
oner of the body ; down to what the soul is in 
its own chosen being. And there, in that under- 
ground of conscious character, regenerating love 
finds faculties not one of which is defunct, sensi- 
bilities which are all quivering with life, a will 
which baffles death in its tenacity; an unshat- 
tered soul, which in its wholeness can obey 
God, and will not. The sinner can give to 
God all there is of him — and will give noth- 
ing. The depravity therefore which his de- 
pendence proves, I repeat, is the depravity of 



DEPTH OF DEPRAVITY. 93 

guilt. Such depravity is an incomparably more 
fearful thing, for it is more profound and more 
hateful, than degeneracy of stock or taint in the 
blood. The difference is the measureless one 
between misfortune and crime. Morally esti- 
mated, the misfortune is nothing — the crime 
infinite. The degeneracy of blood is only a 
condition of probation — the depravity of guilt 
is a chosen doom. 

What, then, must such depravity be, if it be 
so profound as to need the intervention of Om- 
nipotence to root it out? Divest the thought 
for a moment of technical dialect. Conceive 
what must be the character of that intelligent 
soul, that sane mind, that free being, that re- 
sponsible man, whose sheer guilt constitutes his 
helplessness, and creates his need of the inter- 
position of a power such as has no parallel that 
we know of in God's working elsewhere. Who 
shall gauge that moral abyss in which a soul 
lies, when, with its godlike endowments of in- 
telligence, conscience, and freedom intact, it is 
fallen because it would plunge down ; prostrate, 
because it will not rise ; guilty, because the 
unmitigated and unrelenting forces of its will 



94 THE NEW BIRTH. 

are concentrated in the choice to be so ; and 
therefore its salvation is thrown back — an 
anomaly in the history of the universe — upon 
the resources of Infinite Mind? By what si- 
militude shall we paint such a being's unlike- 
ness to God? What shall we call him? Yet 
such is man as the gospel finds him. Such is 
man lost, the world over. Such is man unre- 
generate in schools of science and in homes of 
refinement, as well as in the abodes of poverty 
and the lairs of vice. To the dispassionate 
thoughts of God this ruin of soul is a reality, 
whatever we may think of it. His calm eye 
looks down on the stream of busy life that flows 
through our streets, and singles out this lost 
one and that lost one — how many, who dares 
to conjecture ? — " Lord, is it I ? " To him this 
desolation of godlike being is a reality as vivid 
as the great white throne. 

The moral uses of this doctrine of the New 
Birth disclose also with singular beauty 

THE HARMONY OF TRUTH WITH THE NATURE OF MIND. 

No other theory of human nature prostrates 
man so low before God ; yet no other uses so 



DIGXITT OF GOD. 95 

honestly for the purpose of that abasement man's 
own intelligence, the workings of his own reason, 
the longings of his own heart, the convictions of 
his own conscience. Confronted with the Word 
of God on this subject, a man is made to see 
with his own eyes, to hear with his own ears, to 
understand with his own intellect, to interpret 
his own nature, to feel in his own consciousness, 
and, if regenerated, to yield in his own person- 
ality. Thus the whole man is humbled. No 
one part of him gives the lie to another. God's 
work within him does not falsify his necessary 
beliefs. He is not made a maniac or a fanatic 
or a mystic. JSTor is he left for one moment 
to the reasonable indulgence of a conception 
which jars the integrity of his conscience, or 
taints with suspicion his thoughts of God. 
Truth here, as in all other revelations of 
itself, hints at a system of congruities. 

Through this opening we have also an im- 
pressive outlook upon 

man's renewal as a work worthy of god. 

One of the most suggestive thoughts in our 
modern literature is the title of a sermon by one 



96 THE NEW BIRTH, 

of our own preachers : " The Dignity of Human 
Nature shown from its Ruins." So we might 
discourse of the w Majesty of God as shown in 
the Reconstruction of the Ruins of the Fall." 
In this work God does but reclaim his own. 
He rebuilds the fragments of his own image. 
His work is the more godlike, the more loftily 
we exalt the human constitution within which 
he operates. In this w^e indulge no self-asser- 
tion : we only assert God. For, the more god- 
like the man in his endowments as regenerating 
grace finds him, the more awful has been the 
shock of his fall, the more profound is the 
depth of his ruin, and the more superhuman, 
therefore, are the attributes exhibited in his 
recovery. We have no pinions with which to 
wing our flight to the altitude of such an 
achievement. We can only look on speech- 
lessly at a work so much like God in its 
conception, and so honorable to him in its 
consummation. 

THE LOWLINESS OF GOD. 

Yet we change our position by a step only, 



LOWLINESS OF GOD. 97 

and we see not so much the sovereignty as the 
condescension of God in the New Birth. 

It is characteristic of those aspects of truth 
which from one angle of vision display the Di- 
vine dignity most impressively, that from anoth- 
er they exhibit the Divine lowliness inexplicably. 
So it is with the work of God in man's renewal. 
Viewed from above as a work of dominion, noth- 
ing appears more like a Sovereign God ; yet, 
viewed from within, nothing seems its equal as 
a disclosure of a condescending and self-forget- 
ful Friend. 

Said Whitefield, on one occasion when over- 
come by a sense of his personal election by the 
Divine mercy: "Why me, Lord; why me?" 
So might we inquire respecting every renewed 
child of Adam : Why has God chosen this one ? 
Why that one ? Why is a fallen one singled out 
from this boundless universe of souls? Why 
should God stoop and reach down so low ? Why 
expend his wisdom, his power, his patience, his 
love, his complicated and costly beneficence, on 
passions so odious and hearts so obdurate ? ' We 
can have no adequate conception how odious 
they are to him. We, through mere refinement 



98 THE NE W BIRTH. 

of taste, revolt from contact with guilt in its 
grosser forms. When a sensitive woman en- 
counters savage vices to save the souls of men, 
we look on with awe. But few understand the 
sacrifice. We call it a heroism which is not of 
this world. Yet what, in the comparison, must 
every unrenewed heart be to the mind of God, 
■ — a Mind infinite in its sensibilities as well as 
in its perceptions ; a Mind, therefore, whose 
recoil from sin is an unrevealed experience, be- 
cause no other mind is capable of conceiving 
such a revelation ? It should not have surprised 
us if God had deemed it beneath his dignity to 
regenerate a depraved soul. So man would 
have reasoned. We should have said that Di- 
vine magnanimity ought not to be thus humili- 
ated. Omniscient thought ought not to be 
abased, immaculate purity ought not to be con- 
taminated, infinite love ought not to be shocked, 
the eternal choice ought not to be degraded by 
such inglorious association. Why did not God 
reason so ? Why did he not simply doom the 
ruin to its desolation? Why did he not bury 
its ghastliness from the sight of the universe, 
and — leave it there ? 



THE COMFORTER. 99 

THE HOLY SPIRIT A PERSONAL FRIEND. 

This subject also individualizes the Holy 
Spirit as a personal Friend. That is not an 
unmeaning peculiarity of the plan of salvation 
which assigns to the distinctions in the God- 
head diverse relations to this work. A mature 
Christian experience finds no unnaturalness in a 
concentration of itself at times upon one or 
another of these manifestations of God in re- 
demption. That is an imperfect acquaintance 
with God which has not led the heart to em- 
brace, in its distinct consciousness of affection, 
the Holy Ghost. Our Saviour knew the crav- 
ings of the regenerate heart when he gave to 
the Holy Spirit a sympathetic rather than a 
reverend title : w The Comforter, he dwelleth 
with you." Christian life expresses one of its 
most profound realities in that language of 
affectionate praise in which psalmists have 
taught us to address the third person of the 
Trinity. 

"Lord, am I precious in thy sight? 
Lord, wouldst thou have me thine ? 
May it be given me to delight 
The Majesty divine? 



100 THE NEW BIRTH. 

O Holy Spirit ! dost thou mourn 

When I from thee depart ? 
Dost thou rejoice when I return, 

And give thee back my heart ? 

O happy Heaven ! where thine embrace 

I never more shall leave, 
Nor ever cast away thy grace, 

Nor once thy Spirit grieve." 

THE LAW OF DEPENDENCE. 

We may learn, finally, from this theme one 
element of the spirit with which men should 
seek their own salvation. No sinner can seek 
eternal life aright, none will seek it in earnest, 
whose soul is not pervaded with the conviction 
of his need of a change which must be wrought 
by the power of the Holy Ghost. The soul must 
again stand face to face with God, as in the hour 
of its creation. This conviction cannot legitimate- 
ly lead to helpless inactivity. It cannot tempt to 
impenitent delay of duty. The sense of moral 
helplessness is never to be sought as an end ; it 
is to be used as a means. Its proper drift is to 
deepen more profoundly the sense of guilt, until 
the sense of guilt shall impel the sinner to Him 



THE LAW OF DEPENDENCE. 



101 



who only can redeem. This, then, is the con- 
viction which should be impressed upon an un- 
regenerate sinner. He should feel that he is so 
overloaded by his own sins, he is so obstinate in 
his own perverseness, he is so prostrate in the 
helplessness of his own guilt and in the guilt of 
his own helplessness, that nothing but Almighty 
Grace will save him. This is the measure of his 
guilt, — that he needs Omnipotence to change 
his heart. No other view than this meets the 
facts of a sinner's condition. He is thus in the 
hands of God. He is thus dependent on God's 
will for his conversion. He is made thus de- 
pendent by his own wilfulness in sin ; by noth- 
ing else. This is dependence in the supreme 
degree. It is ultimate, as no other dependence 
can be. 

The question of a sinner's salvation, there- 
fore, must be suspended upon God's own good 
pleasure. It is no anomaly that the result is 
locked up in the recesses of an eternal purpose. 
It is no merciless decree that he hath mercy on 
whom he will have mercy. It is in love that 
the sinner is permitted to stand in this emer- 
gency alone with God. It is the joy of Chris- 



102 THE NEW BIRTH. 

tian faith to leave him there. The solicitude of 
friends must leave him there. All human appli- 
ances and means of grace must leave him there, 
— in the hands of God. We entertain no views 
of truth which would remove him from those 
everlasting arms. We teach no such theology 
as would relieve him from this dependence of 
guilt upon Almighty Grace. We can gather 
around him, with our solicitudes, instructions, 
persuasions, entreaties, warnings. We can go 
with him to the throne of mercy, and there 
plead for him. But there our work ceases. 
We must, and we rejoice that we may, leave 
him there, — each one, shut in to his own 
solitude with God. 



CHAPTER m. 

TRUTH, THE INSTRUMENT OF REGENERATION. 

/T is the misfortune of some of the doctrines 
of our religion that theological inquiry has 
often confounded their speculative with their 
practical elements. Questions respecting 
them which never can be answered in this 
world have stood side by side, as if of equal mo- 
ment, with those which must be answered if an 
earnest mind would find peace. The views of 
truth which are commended to the faith of an 
inquirer often exhibit, therefore, a singular med- 
ley of knowledge and conjecture. Volumes have 
been compiled of the Curiosities of Literature. 
A good service would be rendered to practical 
religion if the curiosities of theology could be 
detached from its essential facts, yet without 
abridgment of legitimate theological inquiry. 
The necessity of such a distinction becomes 

103 



104 THE NEW BIRTH. 

the more obvious the nearer we approach to any 
one of those centres of theological thought which 
represent an intermingling of agencies in human 
destiny. Such a centre of truth is the doctrine 
of The New Birth. In the spirit of these re- 
marks, let us now consider the Instrumentality 
of Truth in Regeneration. 

i. 

BIBLICAL VIEW OF TRUTH AS A POWER. 

The scriptural representations on this subject 
are not recondite ; yet they cover all those 
points of inquiry on which we need instruction, 
that we may form a consistent theory of the 
working of Divine Grace. They may be cited, 
not so much for their force as proof-texts, as for 
their pertinence in giving us the inspired doc- 
trine in inspired expression. Fortunately, the 
most salient of the passages declarative of this 
doctrine need no comment. To utter them is 
to explain them. It is difficult to mistake the 
import of the text : " Of his own will begat He 
us with the word of truth." To the same effect 



EMBLEMS OF TRUTH. 105 

is the Psalmist's declaration : " The law of the 
Lord is perfect, converting the soul." The 
entire burden of the one hundred and nine- 
teenth Psalm is a tribute of adoration to 
Truth as an instrument of Divine purposes. 
Why was Paul " not ashamed of the gospel of 
Christ " ? Because " it is the power of God unto 
salvation." 

Dogmatic statements of doctrine, however, 
are not the favorite forms of inspiration. The 
most emphatic representations of doctrine in the 
Scriptures are pictures. Their forces of expres- 
sion depend on the significance of figurative 
language. Scriptural style is thus hieroglyphic. 
"I have heard of Thee," one might say, in com- 
paring the biblical revelation of God with unin- 
spired theology, — " I have heard of Thee by the 
hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth 
Thee." We must, therefore, often interpret 
calm and literal declarations by the light of 
other texts, in which the same truths a^e more 
intensely expressed or implied in metaphor. We 
must gain vividness of impression at the ex- 
pense of literal accuracy of formula. 

Thus Truth, as an instrument of God's will, is 



106 THE NEW BIRTH. 

at one time a lamp to the feet of a wanderer ; it 
is a light shining in a dark place. Then it is a 
voice from heaven; it crieth at the gates of 
cities ; it is more, it is the rod of God's mouth ; 
yet it is songs in a pilgrimage. Again, it is an 
incorruptible seed ; seed sown in good ground ; 
it is an engrafted word. Martial images and 
mechanic powers and the elements of nature are 
laid under tribute to express it. It is a sword, the 
sword of the Spirit, sharper than any two-edged 
sword ; it is a bow made naked ; the wicked are 
slain by it. It is a helmet, a shield, a buckler ; 
it is exceeding broad; it cannot be broken. 
Goads, nails, fire, a hammer, are its symbols. 
It breaketh the flinty rock ; it is mighty to the 
pulling bown of strongholds. Opposite and 
contrasted emblems are tasked to portray its 
many-sided excellence. It is a fountain; it 
runneth very swiftly : yet it standeth forever ; 
it is settled in heaven ; it cannot be moved till 
heaven.and earth pass away. It is of ancient 
birth ; before the mountains were settled, it was 
brought forth; when there were no fountains 
it was there. ■ The choicest and most fascinating 
objects of man's desire are the imagery of its 



EMBLEMS OF TRUTH. 107 

magnificence. It is a revenue, better than 
choice silver ; men shall buy and sell not again ; 
happy is the man that fincleth it. It is pearl of 
great price ; better than rubies ; like apples of 
gold ; yet to him that thirsteth, it is wine and 
milk, which, in the affluence of the supply, shall 
be given away without money and without price. 
The senses of the body and its most necessary 
functions are made to set forth the efficacy of 
truth. Men taste it as a luscious food ; it is 
sweet to the taste ; sweeter than the honeycomb. 
Their hands have handled it, as a work of rarest 
art. They have walked in it, as in a path at 
noonday. Yet they have hidden it in their 
hearts ; and there it quickeneth, it strengthen- 
eth ; it hath made men free ; it giveth life ; men 
are born again by the Word. Even the most 
daring mysteries of speech are resorted to, to 
intensify truth as a power in the universe. It 
dwelt with God. Before the hills, and when 
there were no depths, then was it by him, as 
one brought up with him; it rejoiced always 
before him. And more, it is God: "I am the 
Truth ; " again, it is God : w the Spirit is 
Truth." 



108 THE NEW BIRTH. 

By such versatility and boldness of imagery 
do the sacred writers pour out in profusion their 
conceptions of truth as an instrument in the ex- 
ecution of God's will. And it is by the aid of 
these picturesque Scriptures that we must vivify 
our interpretation of those declarative passages 
which express logically the instrumentality of 
truth in regeneration. 

It is very obvious that the inspired writers 
have not thought it essential to the objects of 
their mission to measure and weigh their words, 
to meet exigencies suggested by metaphysical 
inquiry. They have spoken as freely, as bold- 
ly, with as spontaneous and unguarded speech, 
on this subject, as on that of the holiness or the 
love of God. Theirs is the dialect of song, 
rather than of diplomacy. They have spoken 
as if they were not thinking of any philosophy 
to be defended or destroyed, or of any polemic 
strategy to be executed or evaded, by the doc- 
trine they should teach. They have spoken like 
plain men talking to plain men. They have 
uttered truth vividly rather than warily. They 
evidently trusted much for the correct interpre- 



THE POWER OF TRUTH A FACT. 109 

tation of their language to the common sense of 
their readers. They have assumed many things, 
they have omitted to guard against many miscon- 
structions, because of their confidence in com- 
mon sense. The necessary beliefs of the race, 
of which common sense is the exponent, lie back 
of inspired language, as of all language. 

We must bear this in mind in any attempt to 
reduce the scriptural declarations to the for- 
mulary of a creed. With this precaution, we 
may safely infer from them all that we need to 
know respecting both the fact and the mode of 
the action of truth in regeneration. 



n. 



THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF TRUTH A FACT IN REGEN- 
ERATION. 

It is scarcely possible to reverent inquiry to 
err on this point. This is an elemental fact in 
scriptural theology, which no necessities of 
philosophy should tempt us to fritter away. 
Specifications of it may be concisely stated in 
the following form : 

First, that God employs in regeneration 



110 THE NEW BIRTH. 

Truth as distinct from instruments of physical 
power. God is wisely studious of congruities. 
He adapts the instrument to the effect. He 
selects that which in its nature is fitted to act 
upon mind, not upon matter. He chooses that 
which is pre-adjusted to the regeneration of 
mind, not to its creation. He calls to his ser- 
vice that which intelligence can perceive, heart 
can feel, will can choose ; that which, therefore, 
the whole man can accept, trust, love, obey. 

Again, God employs in regeneration Truth 
as distinct from falsehood. Not a shadow of 
evidence appears in the Scriptures that a human 
heart w^as ever changed from sin to holiness by 
the force of error. No man was ever moved 
aright by wrong. No soul ever thrived upon 
lies. Profound and honest belief of the false 
can never, in its own proper drift, save a man. 
If it seems to save, there is a way that seemeth 
right, but the end thereof are the ways of death. 
If the man is saved in his error, he is not saved 
by it, but by truth lodged somewhere in it. 
Pure error tends to destruction as inevitably as 
fire. An echo comes down the ages of inspira- 



TRUTH IX CHRIST. Ill 

tion, K that they all might be damned who 
believe not the truth." 

Furthermore, God employs in regeneration 
religious Truth as distinct from all other truth. 
Xot the axioms of mathematics, which appeal 
only to man's sense of the true ; not truths 
which address only man's sense of the beauti- 
ful ; not truths which move only man's sense of 
grandeur ; not truths which gratify only man's 
love of mystery ; not truths which quicken only 
man's sense of honor ; not truths which take 
possession only of man's social affections ; not 
these are the causal instrument of the new 
birth. Eight, holiness, law, love, God, — such 
are the rudimental ideas of truth in this divine 
renewal. Primarily and ultimately they appeal 
to conscience. Through this regal faculty they 
command the whole soul. 

Moreover, in the regeneration of those to 
whom the Christian revelation is given, God 
employs as his chosen and final instrument, 
Truth as it radiates from the person and the 
work of Christ: "I am the Truth; I am the 
Life ; " " The Gospel of Christ is the power of 



112 THE NEW BIRTH. 

God unto salvation"; "Nothing, save Jesus 
Christ and Him crucified." 



THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF TRUTH INVARIABLE. 

Yet once more, so far as we can know, God 
never dispenses with the agency of Truth in 
renewing the hearts of men. If a question be 
raised here, it should concern, not the power of 
God, but the facts of his working. So far as 
any essential doctrine of theology is concerned, 
it may or may not be true that infinite power 
can regenerate a soul by other instrumentalities, 
or without the intervention of instrument. For 
the purposes of a practical faith, it may or may 
not be true that, in the nature of things, regen- 
eration is an act which, apart from the instru- 
mentality of truth, sustains no relation even to 
omnipotence. Be it so, or be it not, that to the 
Divine Mind truth and regeneration — the in- 
strument and the effect — stand in relations of 
necessity immutable and eternal, like the laws 
of numbers or of diagrams, we need not affirm 
or deny. The theological question, if any ex- 



TRUTH INDISPENSABLE. 113 

ists, is a simple question of fact. Does God in 
the renewal of a human soul ever dispense with 
truth as the instrument of the change ? 

The answer to this question is not wholly 
unimportant to consistency of faith. It can be 
given in few words. It is comprised in two 
positions, which a moment's reflection will es- 
tablish. 

One is, that if God does in any instance dis- 
pense with truth as his moral instrument in the 
new birth, the evidence of this fact must be a 
subject of pure revelation. Experience, from 
the nature of the case, cannot prove it. No 
man can intelligently affirm himself to be con- 
scious of a divine fiat thrilling his nature, mak- 
ing a new man of him, with no instrumental 
agency, or with other instrumentality than that 
of truth. The only evidence any man can have 
from experience that his heart is changed is the 
evidence of actual exercises of heart in view of 
truth. Divine power in the change is, to all 
consciousness, so blended with the force of 
truth, — in other words, the efficient cause so 
interpenetrates the instrumental cause, — that 
no mind can intelligently separate them. In- 



114 THE NEW BIRTH. 

deed, consciousness gives us no hint of the 
Divine Cause, except through the success of the 
instrument. I cannot go back of my own con- 
scious exercises in view of truth, and affirm 
that God has changed my heart by sheer will, 
independently of truth. It is plainly impos- 
sible ; as absolutely so as that my eye should 
detect the undulations of sound, or my ear those 
of light. Regeneration, the divine act, is evi- 
denced to consciousness only by conversion, the 
human change ; and this, again, discloses itself 
only in responses of the soul to truth. Experi- 
ence can go no further back than this ; and if ex- 
perience cannot, observation cannot. If, then, 
God has ever wrought the renewal of a soul in 
such anomalous manner as that implied in the 
inquiry before us, the evidence of the fact must 
be a subject of direct and supernatural revela- 
tion ; we can know it only from the Scriptures. 

The second position, then, in answer to this 
inquiry, is, that the Scriptures are silent as to 
the occurrence of any such instance in the his- 
tory of redemption. They do not explicitly 
deny, but neither do they affirm. They inform 
us of many instances of regeneration by means of 



REGENERATION OF INFANTS. 115 

truth ; and of not one without the truth. They 
proclaim indubitably the law of divine working 
in this phenomenon of human experience ; and 
they neither by assertion nor hint point us to a 
solitary exception. They record none in the 
world's history ; they predict none in its future. 
Here, therefore, argument on this topic may 
legitimately end. In all our positive reason- 
ings upon it we must assume that no such ex- 
ception exists. In our practical uses of the 
doctrine we must assume that none will exist to 
the end of time. We cannot logically found 
any article of our faith on the hypothetical pos- 
sibility that the fact is otherwise. 

THE REGENERATION OF INFANTS. 

But if conjecture, wiser than truth, must still 
press inquiry and ask : "How are infants regen- 
erated who die before moral responsibility com- 
mences ? " we respond by inquiries which are at 
least as wise ; though for ourselves we do not 
revere them, nor are our dreams troubled if we 
cannot answer them. We respond by asking : 
How do you know that they are regenerated? 



116 THE NEW BIRTH. 

How do you know that irresponsible beings 
are proper subjects of "regeneration" in the 
sense in which the Scriptures apply the word to 
adult sinners ? Who has told you that the new 
birth has any relation to irresponsible infancy 
more than to irresponsible idiocy ? Is a change 
of heart conceivable in a being who has no 
heart? What is regeneration in an irrespon- 
sible soul ? What authority have we for believ- 
ing anything of such a nondescript? Shall the 
whole drift of the Scriptures be held in check 
by conjectural philosophy? 

But, again, how do you know that there are 
any such infants ? Where is it revealed that a 
soul has ever left this world, or ever will, with 
moral nature absolutely undeveloped? Who 
can assure you that moral birth and physical 
birth are not simultaneous? Who can prove 
that because a being cannot discern between its 
right hand and its left, therefore it cannot in 
any respect or in any degree distinguish right 
thought from wrong ? How much do we know 
of the possibilities of infantile intuitions ? Be- 
sides, who knows what the process of dying is, 
as a means of moral development? Have we 



REGENERATION OF INFANTS. 117 

never seen an aged infant in its coffin ? More- 
over, is not the death of an infant, itself an 
abnormal event ? May it not then be one of a 
group of anomalies which involve an anomalous 
probation and an anomalous qualification for 
heaven ? 

Yet once more : if infants are proper subjects 
of the same change which adults undergo in 
regeneration, then are they not sinners? If 
sinners, have they not sinned? If they have 
sinned, can they not repent? If they can 
either sin or repent, can they not know right 
and wrong; therefore may not they too, in a 
future world, declare gratefully : K Of his own 
will begat he us with the word of truth"? 
Have ye not read : Out of the mouth of 
babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise? 
Who shall dare to limit God's power of con- 
verse with the tiniest image of his own being? 
Are not the whole heavens mirrored in the 
retina of a single eyeball ? How much greater 
is the distance — and what matters it to his re- 
sources — between God and a speechless babe 
than between God and you or me? How do 
we know that in the world of infantile seclusion, 



118 THE NEW BIRTH* 

before speech has broken the eternal silence 
from which that world has sprung, God has not 
ordained a system of moral correspondences 
with heaven, on which he administers a govern- 
ment of freedom, of law, and of grace, as perfect 
in its kind as that of Eden ; a system which he 
guards as lovingly as ours ; and a system be- 
fore the mysteries of which angelic wisdom 
bends reverently, as we stand in awe around 
the marvels of the microscope ? Is such a sys- 
tem any more incomprehensible or incredible 
than the laws of communication by instinct in 
humming-birds? Is it any more marvellous 
than the autocracy of a beehive ? 

We confess to an aesthetic sympathy with 
Wordsworth's fancy in the lines, — 

" Thou who didst wrap the cloud 
Of infancy around us, that Thyself 
Therein with our simplicity awhile 
Mightest hold on earth communion undisturbed." 

Theologically, we see no absurdity in the hope 
that this may be more than poetry. Yet we 
cannot fortify the hope by revelation or by rea- 
son. The proof-texts — where are they ? The 



PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 119 

logic of the facts — to whom has infantile ex- 
perience disclosed it? Our memory is very- 
reticent ; our observation is very ignorant. To 
our reason, " the cloud of infancy " is very dense. 
To our faith, the Bible is very still. What 
moral mysteries are latent in infantile mind we 
therefore do not affirm or deny. We do not 
know. If revelation had been addressed to in- 
fants it might have made us more knowing than 
we are : but, alas, we cannot be wise above that 
which is written for our admonition. Yet, if 
the Scriptures had answered the w obstinate ques- 
tionings" of wise men on this theme, could the 
world have contained the books which should be 

written? 

m. 

THE MODE IN WHICH TRUTH ACTS IN REGENERATION. 

Assuming, then, the fact of the invariable in- 
strumentality of Truth in regeneration so far as 
we know, we are prepared to observe further such 
intimations as the Scriptures give us respecting 
the mode in which Truth operates in the change. 

Here, again, the Bible can scarcely be said to 
affirm anything except by implied assumption. 
One vital principle is thus affirmed. It is that 



120 THE NEW BIRTH. 

of the coincidence of the operation of truth with 
the laws of the human mind. Truth is every- 
where used in the Bible precisely as men are 
wont to use it in persuasive speech. There is 
a freedom in its use ; there is a skill in its use ; 
there is a mingling of boldness and adroitness in 
its use ; there is a studious care to adjust it to 
its use ; there is a wise control of it, now by ut- 
terance, now by reserve, in its use by inspired 
minds ; and there is a confidence, yes, a tri- 
umph, in their assertions of its power, which 
appear to assume that truth has intrinsic fitness 
to move a human mind ; and if to move it, to 
move it aright; and if to move it aright, to 
move it in genial consistency with its own laws. 
Where do we find in the Scriptures disparage- 
ment of truth as a power over unregenerated 
mind ? Where is the proof that the divine 
choice of it as an instrument was arbitrary? 
Where is a hint given of its being a fictitious 
or a factitious means to the end it is used for ? 
Why should we search for it as for hidden treas- 
ure, if intrinsically it has no worth, or if any 
other instrument divinely chosen could be as 
worthy ? That is not a salutary faith which de- 



INSPIRED PREACHERS. 121 

preciates the inherent potency of truth. Divine 
sovereignty gains no honor, and needs none, 
from the reproach of its instrument. Are God 
and Truth rivals in our esteem ? That is not a 
rational fear, then, which shrinks from " means " 
of regeneration, and especially from "natural 
means." Not so do we read the Word of God. 
The change from sin to holiness as portrayed in 
biblical speech strikes us as a restorative, not 
a destructive process. It may be tumultuous, 
but it is not therefore discordant with the laws 
of mind. Truth energized by the Holy Spirit 
may take possession of a man impetuously, so 
that whether he is in the body or out of the 
body he cannot tell ; but his experience is not 
therefore unnatural, or even extra-natural. 

The usages of scriptural appeal are conclu- 
sive in their implications on this topic. How do 
inspired men preach ? They reason with men ; 
they invite men ; they instruct men ; they urge 
men ; they entreat men ; they warn men ; they 
rebuke men ; they accumulate and reiterate all 
the legitimate arts of persuasion in addressing 
men ; as if men, regenerate or unregenerate, elect 
or non-elect, were proper subjects of persuasion ; 



122 THE NEW BIRTH. 

as if they were complete men in their endow- 
ments ; and therefore as if it were the normal 
action of their being to obey the truth. The 
Bible assumes that man everywhere, under all 
conditions of probation, has intellect which can 
receive truth, sensibilities which can respond to 
truth, a will which can act in view of truth, and 
act aright. So far as the philosophy of the oper- 
ation of truth is concerned, we cannot see that 
the Scriptures make any distinction between 
fallen and unfallen mind. We cannot discover 
that the methods of speech chosen by Isa- 
iah, Paul, John, are not precisely the same in 
addressing; men before regeneration as after. 
What is the difference? Where is the proof 
of it? 

Nothing but the necessities of a philosophical 
theory can extract from the Scriptures the dogma 
that truth is an instrument arbritrarily chosen 
by divine wisdom, or chosen for unknown rea- 
sons, or chosen for no perceptible fitness to 
move, and move aright, the most guilty and 
hopeless specimen of depraved mind. True, 
inspiration preserves a wise silence, in direct 
instruction, on the whole subject of the philoso- 



TRUTH AND MIND CONGRUOUS. 123 

phy of regeneration ; but its assumptions of the 
correspondence between truth and mind are as 
unqualified as the boldest assertions could be. 
So versatile is its use of truth, so many-sided 
does truth appear in inspired forms, so affluent 
in its resources, so intricate in its evolutions, 
yet so direct in its aim, and so exultant in its 
consciousness of power, that we cannot but in- 
fer the existence of versatile and profound sus- 
ceptibilities to that power in the soul to which 
it is addressed. So exquisite is the mutual ad- 
justment of mind and truth as represented in the 
biblical forms of speech, that the entire science 
of persuasion might be illustrated by those 
forms ; even by such as are addressed to fallen, 
depraved, unregenerate, non-elect souls. The 
theory of all that the world has felt to be elo- 
quent is realized in them. 

From the scriptural uses of truth, therefore, 
we cannot but infer that in regeneration its 
action is perfectly normal to the soul. Truth 
and mind, in this divine change, come together 
not as metals held in a vice and riveted ; they 
come as light and the optic nerve. Like seeks its 
like. Truth acts thus not by contravention, not 



124 THE NEW BIRTH. 

even by suspension, of the laws of fallen mind. 
It acts in harmony with those laws, in obedience 
to those laws, by means of those laws. They 
are laws which no fall can dislocate. No degree 
of guilt can suspend them. Truth is thus God's 
instrument in effecting a change which it never 
could of itself effect ; but the soul on which it 
operates is never in more healthy concord with 
its own being than when it yields itself to truth, 
and becomes a child of God. God thus wisely 
honors the laws which his wisdom ordained. 

THE SIMPLICITY OF HE GENERATION. 

In the views thus far presented certain collat- 
eral principles are involved, which are of prac- 
tical importance to the preaching and the hearing 
of the gospel. 

Of these may be named, first, the simplicity of 
the work of God in the change of the human heart. 
We see in this mysterious act the same unosten- 
tatious blending of divine efficiency with instru- 
mental agency that we see, the world over, in 
other departments of God's working. For the 



SIMPLICITY OF REGENERATION. 125 

purposes essential to faith in the doctrine of the 
new birth, the change is as intelligible as veg- 
etation. It is as comprehensible as the phe- 
nomenon of sleep. The change from sleep to 
waking is no less mysterious. The beating 
of your heart is no less incredible. The laws of 
mind are as benevolently guarded in the one 
case as those of vegetable and animal life in the 
others. 

This view should specially commend itself as 
a corrective of certain prejudices which may be 
fatal to religious life. Is there not a class of 
solidly built minds which are constitutionally 
incredulous of a supernatural regeneration, be- 
cause they have no conception of it as anything 
else than the effect of a shock inflicted upon the 
spiritual nature ? They imagine it as involving 
a suspense of conscious personality. They have 
heard believers affirm that it may be imparted 
to a man in sleep. The creation of Eve seems 
to them not an inapt symbol of it. Hence, they 
rank faith in it with other eccentricities of 
dreams. Their good sense revolts from the 
whole thing. Have we not known certain timid 
minds which have believed, indeed, but only to 



126 THE NEW JUHTJT. 

shrink from their faith as a practical experience, 
because their faith also is steeped in materialism ? 
Regenerating grace as they conceive of it is 
spiritualized electricity. They recoil from a re- 
ligious life, for a reason analogous to that which 
leads them to draw back from a voltaic batterv. 
Contortions, spiritual or muscular, are alike re- 
pulsive. Some, too, believe only to despair of 
salvation ; others, only to live in sullen impeni- 
tence, because they are not conscious of the in- 
fusion of new vitality into their moral being. Do 
not pastors often encounter sad inquirers, whose 
minds are saturated with conceptions of the new 
birth scarcely more spiritual than those of Nico- 
demus ? Are not these conceptions in part the 
result of accepting literally the symbolic language 
of the pulpit in the enforcement of this doc- 
trine ? I have known a man to watch and pray 
for palpable concussion with the regenerating 
Power, as he would spread his sails to catch the 
winds if he were becalmed at sea. Such unfor- 
tunate experiences are the legitimate fruit of any 
theory of regeneration which reduces a change 
of heart to an infraction of nature. 

But viewed as the normal effect of truth ener- 



SIMPLICITY OF REGENERATION. 127 

gized by the will of God, this divine renewal 
falls into the same plane with other phenomena 
in which cause and instrument work blended to 
one end. The greatness of the change is not 
violence of change. Supernaturalness of cause 
is not unnaturalness in effect. Deity in the 
power is not miracle in the result. In material 
nature are not the most profound phenomena 
the most simple? The very mystery of their 
causation enhances by contrast their lucidness 
as facts. What is the most sublime change the 
physical world ever undergoes? Is it an earth- 
quake ? Is it not rather the noiseless change from 
night to day ? The mightiest forces in the uni- 
verse are silent forces. Who ever heard the 
budding of an oak? Who was ever deafened 
by the falling of the dew? Who was ever 
stunned by a solar eclipse ? So is it with the 
august phenomenon of a change of heart. So 
far as we know, it is the most radical change a 
human spirit can experience. It is a revolution- 
ary change. Disembodiment by death, mor- 
ally estimated, is not so profound. Still, a 
change of heart is not an unnatural change. It 
is never miraculous. It is not necessarily con- 



128 THE NEW BIRTH. 

vulsive. It is not necessarily even destructive 
of self-possession. God employs in it an instru- 
ment exquisitely adjusted to the mind of man as 
an intelligent and free being. Truth may act in 
it with an equipoise of forces as tranquil as that 
of gravitation in the orbits of the stars. 

No, it is not of necessity a tumultuous expe- 
rience to which God calls us when he invites us 
to be saved. By what emblem have the Scrip- 
tures expressed the person of the Holy Ghost? 
Is it an eagle ? " And John bare record, saying, 
r I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like 
a dove J" "Come," is the select language of in- 
spiration, "come, and ye shall find 5 ' — what? 
struggle, terror, torture? No; "ye shall find 
— peace. "Come ye," — come who? Come, 
ye strong, ye men of valor, ye mighty men 
armed, ye heroes? No; "come, ye that labor 
and are heavy laden ; come, ye bruised reeds ; 
come, ye broken-hearted ; come, ye whose 
whole heart is faint; come, ye poor in spirit; 
come, ye blessed ones who hunger, who thirst, 
who mourn, who weep ; come, ye old men 
whose strength faileth; come, ye youths who 
are as when a standard-bearer fainteth; come, 



COMMON SENSE IN CONVERSION. 129 

ye daughters of my people who are girded with 
sackcloth; forbid* not little children to come." 

*v\ 

EVIDENCES OF CONVERSION INTELLIGIBLE TO 

COMMON SENSE. 

Another principle involved in the doctrine of 
the Instrumentality of Truth in regeneration, is 
that of the rational nature of all trustworthy 
evidences of religious character. A change of 
heart, from the nature of the case, must mani- 
fest itself. Regenerate character, like all other 
character, will act itself out. Like all other 
character, its evidences will be intelligible and 
forceful to the common sense of men. 

Christianity, in this respect, vindicates its 
superiority to other systems of religion. In its 
tests of character, as in its doctrines, it makes 
less demand on the credulity of men than is 
made by any other religion which this world has 
known — less even than is made by atheism. 
Monstrosities of life, as of belief, have been the 
invariable characteristic of infidelity whenever 
it has existed on a large scale. It appears to be 
growing more inane and senile as the world 



130 THE NEW BIRTH. 

grows older. The early paganism had scarcely 
so wild a development of lunacy in religion as 
that which our age witnesses in Morruonism, in 
Spiritualism, and in philosophic Pantheism. 
Beside everything that man has originated in 
religion, Christianity is alone in the fidelity with 
which it stands by the convictions of the human 
conscience, and in the severity with w x hich it 
applies the laws of good sense to the judgment 
of character. 

The vital test of what a man is, in the divine 
judgment of him, is truth acting by the com- 
mon laws of mind, and therefore working out ef- 
fects intelligible to com on sense. Presentiments, 
irrational impressions, apocryphal revelations, 
ridiculous prodigies, and outrages upon the 
moral sense of mankind, find no place in the 
Christian groundwork of experience. Marvel- 
lous excitements, as such, have no significance 
in the Christian philosophy of conversion. In- 
controllable or unreasonable excitements in re- 
ligious life are no more commendable than any 
other form of frenzy. The pathological phenom- 
ena sometimes witnessed in revivals are a mis- 
fortune, perhaps a satanic infliction. The divine 



COMMON SENSE IN CONVERSION. 131 

ideal of regeneration provides no place for them, 
except as it tolerates compassionately the infirm- 
ities of our nature. He remembereth that we 
are but flesh. 

So, Christianity is silent when an adulterous 
generation seeketh after signs from heaven. 
When men hear voices in the air, and stare at 
visions in the night, and read handwritings on 
the walls, and "seek unto them that have famil- 
iar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and 
mutter," and frame creeds out of the antics of 
ff household gods " ; the spirit of Christian faith 
looks down calmly, and says : n The prophet 
that hath a dream, let him tell a dream " ; and 
then goes on its way. If a Christian believer 
lingers, trusting in prophets of lies, who say : 
ff I have dreamed, I have dreamed"; it turns 
and looks upon him as our Lord looked on Pe- 
ter. The tests by which it would try the spirit 
of a man all assume that God works with natu- 
ral means, by natural laws, and for results sig- 
nalized by their purity and their dignity. In- 
telligent faith in God ; an honest discovery of 
sin ; spiritual craving of holiness ; the trust of 
penitence in the blood of Christ ; the depend- 



132 THE NEW BIRTH. 

ence of guilt upon the Holy Ghost ; and a giv- 
ing of the whole soul in eternal consecration 
to God's service, and acceptance of God's love, 
and joy in God's being — these are pre-eminent 
among the responses which a regenerate heart 
makes to truth as the instrument of the divine 
change within. They are intelligible responses. 
They are reasonable, natural, honorable respon- 
ses. They constitute a new life in the soul, 
which honest men cannot help trusting, and 
wise men cannot help revering. * And God saw 
that it was good." 

CREED ESSENTIAL TO CHARACTER. 

A third principle inferable from the doctrine 
before us, is that of the importance of truthful- 
ness in theological opinion. The new birth as 
represented in the Scriptures gives no support 
to the theory, so natural to superficial thought, 
that belief, as such, is of little moment in reli- 
gion ; that God will judge characters, and not 
creeds ; that we shall not be held responsible for 
obeying another man's faith in preference to our 
own. On the contrary, in regeneration char- 



CREED AND CHARACTER. 133 

acter and creed are indissolubly united. God's 
instrument in effecting the change is truth. 
Falsehood finds no place there. Truth in car- 
icature finds none. The less a man believes of 
truth, the more distant is he from the probable 
range of regenerating grace. The more dis- 
torted a man's opinions are, the more fearful are 
his perils. The more negative his convictions 
become, the more faint becomes all reasonable 
hope that he will be saved. In terrific consist- 
ency with this principle is the scriptural repre- 
sentation of the most hopeless depth of sin, as 
that of those to whom God sends delusion, that 
they may believe a lie. God acts in regenera- 
tion where truth can act ; not elsewhere. The 
mind that withholds itself from truth is withhold- 
ing itself from God. 

There is reason to believe respecting many 
constant listeners to the preaching of the gos- 
pel, that here is the exact point at which lies 
the chief obstacle in their way to heaven. 
They will not assent to certain truths, the force 
of which is essential to draw them within the 
range of God's regenerating decree. They are 
repelled by one truth ; they are heedlessly con- 



134 THE NEW BIRTH. 

fused by another; they are uninterested in a 
third; perhaps in part persuaded of many, 
they are advancing in consolidation of character 
with hearty opinions upon none. The Holy 
Spirit passes them by, because they will not 
credit his truth. They thrust the instrument 
of his grace from them, and he leaves them in 
their sins. He does not there his mighty 
works, because of their unbelief. That is in 
reality a delicate and perilous work which a 
man performs when he adopts his religious opin- 
ions. In that process often occurs the very 
crisis of his destiny. At that point in his ex- 
perience may the contending forces for good 
and evil meet in fearful equipoise. 

In this view, also, the varieties of opinion 
in evangelical theology are not unimportant. 
That theology which is most truthful, other 
things being equal, will be most successful in 
the salvation of souls. Every distortion of 
theological faith is perilous, we may be assured, 
somewhere in the progress of its history. 
False combinations of doctrines which isolated 
are true, or false isolations of doctrines which 
ia combination are true, are obstructions to the 



RELIGION AND ART. 135 

work of God at some point in the development 
of their sequences. A disproportioned shad- 
ing of a single doctrine will surely attract some 
mind, whose way to heaven it will darken. 
The foreshortening of a single group in the 
representation of scriptural theology may so 
impair its truthfulness of perspective, that to 
some soul, somewhere, at some time, in some 
juncture of probationary discipline, that shall 
seem to be a distorted theology, a caricature of 
theology, a hideous theology, and therefore a 
false theology — a theology which no amount 
of evidence can prove to a sane mind, and no 
authority can enforce upon a sound heart. 
That soul, such a theology — no matter what 
extreme of opinion it represents — may consign 
to perdition; yet it may be a gospel which 
angels have seemed to preach. 

vn. 

CHRISTIANITY INDEPENDENT OF FINE ART. 

A fourth principle collateral to the doctrine 
we have considered is, that the life of Christian 
institutions is in great degree independent of the 
auxiliaries of Fine Art. Two theories respect- 



136 THE NEW BIRTH. 

ing the relations of Christianity to art are af- 
fecting the taste and the practice of the Protestant 
Christian world. The one theory assumes that 
religion and art go hand in hand, and are equal- 
ly interdependent. Certain imaginative minds 
even conceive of them as substantially identical. 
They are at least so far interchangeable that en- 
thusiasm in the one slides naturally into enthu- 
siasm in the other. Taste and conscience are 
indistinguishable. Beauty and God are one. 
Accordingly, it is believed that to secure to 
Christianity any high development in the life 
of a people, pre-eminence must be given to mu- 
sic, architecture, painting, and statuary. These, 
again, must be seconded by scenic forms of ser- 
vice and by priestly attire. A preacher must 
become as a lovely song and one that playeth 
well upon an instrument. The simple meeting- 
house of the fathers " should be turned end for 
end " ; the organ should be the cynosure of at- 
traction, and "the pulpit nothing but an organ." 
This theory, with variations, lies at the founda- 
tion of the popular taste of our own day for the 
revival of certain forms of mediaeval architect- 
ure in the construction of churches. 



RELIGION AND ART. 137 

The other theory, without condemning one 
variety of art or another, as such, and as in 
some sense a handmaid of religion, still assumes 
that in the very nature of Christianity there lies 
a certain independence of all forms of art. 
The vital resources of religious power are not in 
them. Christian truth is sovereign over them. 
It uses them in their grand and spiritual dig- 
nity, but refuses to subject itself to their scenic 
and sensuous frivolities. This view is obvi- 
ously sustained by the doctrine of divine instru- 
mentality in regeneration. The gospel presents 
itself to men by that noble title : "The Truth as 
it is in Jesus." Its power lies in the clear, 
calm conceptions which mind forms of truth. 
Through truth thus received by a human spirit, 
God breathes regenerating efficacy, and man 
becomes a living soul. 

We need not, therefore, throw back the sup- 
port of Christianity upon the appendages of 
fine art. We care not to clothe our clergy in 
classic or sacerdotal robes. We must not 
burden our worship with responsive liturgies. 
We will not employ, or vie with, operatic 
troupes in our service of song. We dare not 



138 THE NEW BIRTH. 

crowd our sanctuaries with the master-pieces 
of the studio. We cannot enjoy a dim relig- 
ious light. We tire of the gorgeousness of 
mediaeval ornament and the cumbrousness of 
Gothic columns in the structure of our churches. 
The kaleidoscope of memorial windows does no£ 
quicken in us a devout spirit. Why should we 
struggle to reproduce, in place of our plain 
meeting-houses, the temples of Greece, or the 
basilicas of Eome, or the cathedrals of Central 
Europe ? We will not abjure these resuscitations 
of art, except as they become substitutes of 
truth. But as such they minister to an imagi- 
native, and therefore an effeminate, and at 
length a corrupt, religionism. We must say of 
them, "Let the dead bury their dead." We 
prefer, indeed, that art should await the bid- 
ding of Christian truth to originate new forms 
more becoming than these to Christian maturity. 
Has Christian art no resources in reserve for 
a millennial future? Even in this work, let 
it be but a modest handmaid of the Christian 
conscience. Let it follow in the train of instru- 
mentalities auxiliary to the gospel, as Miriam 
followed the ark of bulrushes in the flags by the 



TRUTH THE POWER OF GOD. 139 

river-side — afar off, to see what would be done 
unto the child ; and, like the Hebrew maiden, 
let it be content to do humble and incidental 
service. Then that service shall work in with 
laws of invisible and eternal Providence. 

We must not, we cannot, make the gospel 
dependent on any of these subordinate aids. 
Its great strength lies in God's independence 
of them. It leans to severity of tastes, and to 
simplicity of usages, and to forms of worship 
uncomplicated and unimposing to the senses. 
This it does through its awe-struck sympathy 
with the spirituality of God. The glory of its 
work on earth is, that as the Truth of God it 
can go anywhere in the strength of God. In 
Grecian temples, hi Indian pagodas, in barba- 
rian amphitheatres, in Turkish mosques, in 
mediaeval cathedrals ; in Puritan conventicles, 
in Quaker meeting-houses, in floating bethels, 
in barns, in lumber-rooms, in log-huts ; in the 
forests, at the sea-side, on the prairie ; every- 
where, it can be itself the power of God and the 
wisdom of God. Its preachers need not be 
learned in the millinery of churchly costume ; 
nor careful to know whether vaulted roofs, or 



140 THE NEW BIRTH. 

painted panels, or plain ceiling, or unhewn 
rafters, or green leaves, or the stars of heaven, 
are over their heads. If they can but speak 
God's truth as God bids them, it will do God's 
work. 

vm. 

THE TRUE IDEAL OF THE PUTFIT. 

In sympathy with this view, the instrumen- 
tality of Truth in regeneration suggests the 
scriptural theory of preaching. In the light of 
this doctrine, preaching is a perfectly natural 
work, successful through supernatural power. 
Its object is to instruct men in the knowledge 
of truth, to impress truth on the conscience and 
the heart, and to win to obedience of truth the 
estranged human will. To these ends it is a 
perfectly philosophical means. Its action is 
normal to the constitution of the soul. Its aims 
and its methods commend themselves to the good 
sense of all candid minds. They are not philo- 
sophically different from those of honest speech 
in other forms. But unlike those, preaching is 
overshadowed, in the very conception of it, by 
the Divine Presence. There lies the sole hope 



THE IDEAL PREACHER. 141 

of its success. Finite instrument in the hand of 
Infinite Power ; Nature used by Him who made 
it : such is the true ideal of the pulpit. 

Preaching, then, is no idle play for the amuse- 
ment of idle minds. Its design is not to fasci- 
nate men by euphony of speech, to startle by 
oddity of conceit, or quaintness of imagery, or 
boisterous declamation. It is not to work upon 
the magnetic organism which unites body and 
mind, so as to excite sensibility not sustained 
by thought. Still less is it to soothe the relig- 
ious instinct of men, while evading or stupefying 
those cravings which forecast eternity. A gen- 
uine preacher will engage in his work with in- 
tense intelligence of purpose. He will preach 
truth to the calm, sober judgment of men. He 
will lead men to a right life by implanting with- 
in them right convictions of truth. He will 
kindle their sensibilities by so presenting truth 
as to set their minds to thinking. Vividness of 
belief, depth of feeling, holiness of will, all 
borne up and ruled by truth, — these will be 
the object of a wise preacher's aim. These he 
will strive to weave into the homeliness of real 
life. He will preach to men's wants rather than 



142 TEE KEW BIRTH. 

their wishes. The wholeness of his soul in its 
co-working with God will revolt from making 
the pulpit anything less than a regenerating 
power. 

He may, indeed he must, employ varied and 
skilful methods of address. Things new and 
old he will bring from his treasure. Acceptable 
words even, he will seek out diligently. No art 
of orator or poet or moral painter is unworthy 
of him. But the crowning feature of his work 
is, that it breathes with the singleness and the 
intensity of his desire to make truth reach and 
sway the whole being of his hearers, through 
time and in eternity ; and with the courage of 
his faith that, in God's strength, and in that 
only, it will do this. This ardor of devotion to 
Truth, and to God in Truth, palpitates all 
through the structure of a Christian sermon. 
This makes preaching seem intensely alive and 
concrete. This sanctifies all art in the work of 
the pulpit. It subordinates art, and conceals it 
from obtrusion. The hearer sees no art; the 
preacher is conscious of none. Only God in 
Truth is felt in living presence. Such is the 



CRITICISM OF THE PULPIT. 143 

theory of preaching as implied in the divine 
instrumentality of the new birth. 

This theory is specially opposed to a certain 
construction of discourses, some varieties of 
which, we have reason to fear, are craved by the 
popular taste of our own day, and are sometimes 
given from the pulpit. 

"GREAT SERMONS." 

Here let us distinguish precisely the evil ; for 
I must believe that undeserved censure has been 
broadcast upon both the pulpit and the popular 
taste by indiscriminate rebuke. That is not a 
healthful caution, for it is neither reasonable nor 
scriptural, nor true to the teachings of history, 
which decries the careful, the studied, the elab- 
orate, the anxious use of what are ambiguously 
called "natural means" in preaching. God rec- 
ognizes no other than natural means. Super- 
natural power, acting through natural means, is 
the divine ideal of successful preaching. So far 
as we have anything to do with it, the means 
are as essential as the power. Philosophically 
speaking, indeed, we have nothing to do with 
anything but the means. Prayer is but a means 
auxiliary to truth. 



144 THE NEW BIRTH. 

That is a perfectly legitimate taste, therefore, 
which demands thought in the pulpit, as every- 
where else where mind attempts to influence 
mind. That would be a criminal weakness in 
the pulpit which should fail to meet such de- 
mand. We must commend the alertness of the 
popular mind which requires penetrative and 
suggestive preaching. Men alway require this 
when they 'are in earnest. They have a right to 
it. We should not be fearful of "great ser- 
mons." We are in no peril of greatness above 
measure. It would be more becoming to our 
modesty to stir up each other's minds in remem- 
brance of the evil wrought by small sermons. 
But the truth is that, in this work of preach- 
ing Christ, " great " and " small " are imperti- 
nent adjuncts. In such a work nothing is great 
but God ; nothing small in his service. That 
is not only a hopeless, it is a positively false, 
policy, which, in its fear of an excess of stimulus 
in the pulpit, would put down the popular crav- 
ing for thought, by inundating the pulpit with 
commonplaces whose only claim to attention 
is that they are true. Even that which is so 
severely and justly censured as " sensational 



THOUGHTFUL PREACHING. 145 

preaching " is not so unworthy of respect as that 
preaching which popular impatience describes 
by the use of an old word in our English vocab- 
ulary, and calls it "humdrum." 

The policy of frowning upon the raciness of 
the pulpit as an unholy thing is not the policy 
commended in the Scriptures ; nor is it the pol- 
icy which historically God has blessed. Apostles 
charge us : Be strong ; quit you like men. The 
Bible itself is the most thrillingly living volume 
in all literature. Why do philosophers turn to 
it when all other wisdom is exhausted? Yet 
savages have wept, entranced by it, when thej^ 
would play with their plumes under the reading 
of Pilgrim's Progress or Eobinson Crusoe. The 
testimony of history is that in every period of 
religious awakening in the world the pulpit has 
been intellectually awake. Preaching has been 
thoughtful, weighty, pungent, startling, and 
timely ; so broad awake as to impress the world 
as a novelty. At such times there is very little 
of conservative tranquillity in it. It seems rather 
to be turning the world upside clown. It has 
always been thus ; it always will be. Cannot the 

depth of revivals of religion be generally meas- 
10 



146 THE NEW BIRTH. 

ured by the weight of the discussions in which 
the pulpit has pressed down truth into the popu- 
lar heart? 

The principle, in brief, which should decide all 
questions respecting the intellectuality of preach- 
ing is this : that the popular mind will always 
demand, and ought always to receive, so much 
of weighty, racy, penetrative, original thought 
as the popular conscience is sufficiently educated 
to appropriate ; and it should receive no more. 

AFFECTATIONS OF THE PULPIT. 

But there is a style of preaching which is re- 
gardless of this principle, and of all others that 
concern the necessities of souls. I refer to 
that structure of discourse, in which the sacred- 
ness of truth as the divine instrument of salva- 
tion is buried beneath the display of artistic 
skill. There is a mode of preaching in which a 
sermon becomes purely a work of art, and noth- 
ing more. This error exists in a variety of 
forms. Sometimes it is the art of constructing 
authoritative formula of theology. Doctrines 
are defined and defended with reference to 
nothing but their orthodoxy of statement, and 



CLERICAL AFFECTATIONS. 147 

their place in a catechism or a creed. Again, it 
is the art of scholastic reasoning. Argument is 
constructed with care for nothing but its logical 
rigidity — and, we may blandly add, its aridity. 
In other cases it is the art of transmutation of 
truth from the dialect of experience to the dia- 
lect of philosophy. Sermons are framed in 
morbid fear of cant and commonplace. With- 
out one new thought, or new shading of an old 
thought, the preacher would fain lift up his 
weary and bewildered hearers from the lan- 
guage of life, that is, the language he has lived 
and therefore knows, to the language of the 
"higher thinking," whatever that may be. He 
preaches as if the chief end of man in the pulpit 
were to evade the peculiarities of Christian 
speech. In its best interpretation, his discourse 
is only an exchange of the cant of the church for 
the cant of the school. 

In a still different form, this clerical affecta- 
tion becomes the art of elegant literature. The 
graces of composition are elaborated with solici- 
tude for nothing but its literary finish. They 
are drawn, like the lines of an engraving on a 
plate of steel, with fastidious and mincing art, 



148 THE NEW BIRTH. 

studious only of their effect in a scene which is 
to be set in a gilded frame, and exhibited to con- 
noisseurs. Application of truth is made, if it be 
made, to an imaginary audience or to an abstract 
man. It is clothed in archaic speech, which nc 
man, woman, or child of a living audience will 
take to heart. An exhortation to repentance 
even may be so framed and uttered as to be 
nothing but the closing scene of a drama. 

Perhaps the most vapid variety of these affec- 
tations of the pulpit is that which, for the want 
of a more significant name, may be termed the 
art of churchly etiquette. This is an inheritance 
from a dead age. Its chief aim is to chain the 
pulpit fast to its traditional dignity, to protect 
it from plebeian excitements, and specially to 
seclude it from the vulgarity of participation in 
the conflict of living opinions. With this am- 
bition, the clergy assume the style of reverend 
fathers in God, and talk down to their hearers. 
Their dialect is that of affectionate patronage. 
They preach as an order of superior beings. At 
a sublime altitude above living humanity, they 
speak benignly to the condition of buried centu- 
ries. They discuss extinct species of thought. 



CLERICAL AFFECTATIONS. 149 

They exhort to untimely forms of virtue. They 
prop up decaying usages and obsolescent rites 
of worship. They are absorbed in the romance 
of priesthood. It may happen as an incident to 
their ministry that they tread delicately through 
the thoroughfare of a bloody revolution, affect- 
ing to ignore the forces which are embattled in 
the popular heart, and counting their mission 
successful if they keep the pulpit intact from 
the great agonies which are seething around it. 

In a word, under such theories of preaching 
a sermon becomes a catechism, or a disquisition, 
or an essay, or an allegory, or a poem, or a 
painting, or a reverie, or an " encyclical letter," 
or a nondescript beneath all these, a&d nothing 
more. Preaching is literally reduced to an art, 
and religion is degraded to a science — reduced 
and degraded, not because of science and art, 
but because they are made nothing else than a 
science and an art, or are even made caricatures 
of both. The intense sacredness of truth as 
God's instrument in the quickening of dead 
souls, and in satisfying the cravings of their 
awakening, is lost out of sight in the preachers 
solicitude for certain accuracies, or prettinesses, 



150 THE NEW BIBTH. 

or dignities, or oddities, or distortions of artis- 
tic form. 

POPULAR CRITICISM OF THE PULPIT. 

We are accustomed to condemn such preach- 
ing as defective in religious spirit. It is so. 
We say, in that most expressive dialect of Chris- 
tian experience, that it wants " unction." It 
does so. We whisper that it betrays a moral 
delinquency in the preacher. We are right in 
this. But are we not often guilty of a fallacy 
in the commendations bestowed upon the very 
thing against which our religious instinct has 
hurled the heaviest anathema that can be uttered 
in criticism of the pulpit ? Such preaching is 
often approved for its orthodoxy, for its science, 
for its literature, for its churchly dignity. You 
hear it commended as good doctrine, good phi- 
losophy, good logic, good rhetoric, good poetry, 
good painting, good acting, good manners, good 
art in all its forms, and yet you cannot feel it to 
be good preaching. It is fancied to be good for 
every purpose except that of doing good. The 
intellect, it is affirmed, approves it, imagination 
delights in it, sensibility revels in it, taste courts 



CRITICISM OF THE PULPIT. 151 

it, culture craves it, everything in man that is 
worthy of respect makes obeisance to one form 
or another of it, except his conscience ; and this 
stands by as a disconsolate monarch, lamenting 
his impotence to put down as a sin that which 
by the consent of all allied powers is exalted as 
an accomplishment. Confusion follows, there- 
fore, in clerical practice. False art comes to be 
recognized as the legitimate fruit of a sound 
faith, or a scholarly training, or a churchly taste 
in the pulpit. Yet the obstinate conviction is 
underlying all the while, that this does not meet 
the responsibilities of the pulpit, nor do its 
work. Thus a divorce at length comes about, 
in the very theory of what the pulpit should be, 
between the moral usefulness of preaching and 
all its other excellences. 

To illustrate the truth of this in but a single 
phase of it : have we not learned to speak of a 
certain class of ministers in tones of compas- 
sionate criticism, in which our culture and our 
conscience give the lie to each other? We 
say of one of these brethren in Christ : K He is a 
useful preacher, but he is not eloquent. He is 
a good man ; he is an earnest man ; he is a de- 



152 TEE NEW BIRTH. 

vout man ; but — he is not eloquent. He is a 
faithful pastor ; he is a laborious pastor ; he is a 
successful pastor ; but — he is not eloquent. He 
is a truthful preacher ; he is a sound preacher ; he 
is a solemn preacher : flippant men are awed by 
the earnestness of his discourse ; thinking men 
are strengthened by his faithful words ; proud 
men sit as children at his feet ; scoffers rage at 
his plain speech ; men who rail at him are held, 
year after year, beneath his pulpit, as by an in- 
visible hand; but — he is not eloquent. Souls 
are converted under his timely ministration; 
somehow — you cannot tell how, the wind blow- 
eth where it listeth, but somehow — he hath 
the tongue of the learned ; he knoweth how to 
speak a word in season to him that is weary ; 
the common people hear him gladly; woman 
discerns of what spirit he is, and follows him, as 
she went early to the sepulchre ; and little chil- 
dren come running unto him and praying that he 
will take them in his arms and bless them ; but, 
this man, so honored of God; this man, so re- 
vered by ministering angels ; this man, so much 
like Christ ; this man, we cannot, oh no, we 
dare not, pronounce — an eloquent preacher ! " 



FALSE ART IN PREACIIIXG. 153 

Never was a more egregious error committed 
than in this whole style of criticism, in judg- 
ment of the pulpit. If nothing is beautiful but 
truth, neither is anything respectable which is 
not true to God's thought. A sermon which 
is only a model of orthodoxy, or of science, or 
of literature, or of churchly conservatism, and 
which shoots by or vaults over the plain, living 
applications of truth as God's instrument in 
meeting the actual condition of souls, has no 
qualities which should win for it the respect of 
an earnest man. For the great uses of the pul- 
pit it is an abortion. The falseness of it to the 
mission of a preacher vitiates its very virtues. 
Good taste condemns it as violently as con- 
science. All noble culture cries out against it 
as sternly as the word of God. No tribunal is 
more fatal to its claims than that of Christian 
scholarship. No voice is more indignant in the 
rebuke of it than that of the most accomplished 
manhood. Such preaching is not only not good 
preaching, but it is not anything else which a 
symmetrical and earnest soul can approve. De- 
mosthenes, Chatham, John Adams, had they 
been preachers of the gospel, would never have 



154 THE NEW BIRTH. 

preached thus, any more than Paul. They would 
not have listened to such preaching* any more 
complacently than John Knox. 

Let us bring the pulpit to its true test, though 
the human work be burned, and though the 
preacher be saved as by fire. Lay it open to 
the light, as it appears by the side of the sim- 
plicity, the directness, the timeliness, the sa- 
credness, and the intensity of truth as used by 
the Holy Spirit in the salvation of souls. There 
lies the proof of a living pulpit. Confronted 
with such an ideal, the affectations I have de- 
scribed shrivel into nothingness. Vanity of 
vanitie, saith the preacher ; all is vanity ! They 
are false to the very titles in which their praise is 
so often vaunted. They are not " sound " ; they 
are not " scholarly " ; they are not " eloquent " ; 
they are not w churchly " ; they are not " beauti- 
ful " ; they are not " finished " ; they are not w in 
good taste"; for — they are not good sense. 
And they are not good sense because they are 
not subdued by awe of truth, as God's instru- 
ment, put into the preacher's hand for ends 
which it is impiety to neglect. No matter how 
much truth may be wrapped up in these false 



POWER OF REPOSE. 155 

arts, souls never feel it; the preacher does not 
feel it. "Neither can be quickened by it, any 
more than corpses in arctic seas can feel the 
latent caloric of the ice-fields which have con- 
gealed their life-blood. 

REPOSE IN TRUTH. 

When one of those useful pastors, who are 
"not eloquent," encounters ungenial criticism, 
it is his right to rest calmly upon his calling of 
God to the preaching of truth. No secret dis- 
trust should impair the joy of such a preacher 
in his work. There is a certain trust in God's 
word that truth shall do its work in the hearts 
of men, which every preacher needs to make him 
a man of power. It is an equable and joyous 
trust. It is a spirit of repose in the destiny of 
the instrument which God has chosen. Once 
possessed of it, and possessed by it, a preacher 
feels that he can afford to preach truth truthful- 
ly. He need not exaggerate truth. He need 
not distort it. He need not deck it with mere- 
tricious ornament. He need not surround it 
with eccentric illustration. He need not swathe 



156 THE NEW BIRTH. 

it in transcendental speech. He need not be- 
labor it with theatrical declamation. He need 
not mince it, nor trim it, nor inflate it, nor paint 
it. He has only to preach it, thoughtfully, viv- 
idly, variously, and with the singleness of an 
intense soul living in communion with God, and 
then let it do its own work. It will do its work. 
He may have faith in it. In the midst of ex- 
hausting toils, when wearied with that stern 
suppression of fitful hopes and apprehensions 
which must enter largely into every intense life, 
he may find this spirit of repose in truth falling 
upon him like the mantle of a prophet. He may 
hiow then that his words are the wisdom of God 
and the power of God. He will often speak 
with the consciousness of that which is a pledge 
of his success. He will speak with a daring 
neglect of false expedients and conventionali- 
ties, which will astonish men who do not know 
where is the hiding of his power. 

We are told that Napoleon in battle used to 
be restless, anxious, irritable, and taciturn, till a 
certain critical point was reached in the execu- 
tion of his orders ; but that after that crisis was 
past, — a crisis invisible to all eyes but his, — 



POWER OF REPOSE. 157 

and long before any prospect of victory appeared 
to his subordinates, he suddenly became calm, 
bland in his manners, apparently careless in his 
manoeuvres, even jovial in his conversation ; and 
at the battle of Eylau, at the risk of defeat, as 
others judged, he lay down to sleep on a hillock, 
which the enemy's grape-shot grazed without 
wakening him. In explanation of his hardi- 
hood, he said that there was a turning-point in 
all his plans of battle beyond which, if it were 
safely reached, he deemed victory secure. He 
knew then that he could not lose the day. His 
work was done. 

The repose of genius in the assurance of re- 
sults which are invisible to inferior minds, can 
bear no comparison with that rest in the power 
of truth which a preacher may feel, and which, 
if he does feel it reasonably, will go far towards 
realizing his expectations of success. The secret 
of his power will be simply that he is proclaim- 
ing God's truth, at God's bidding, and in God's 
methods. He gives to men that which God has 
given to him. The cloud of the Divine Pres- 
ence envelops him. Within that august protec- 
tion he performs his life's work. He cannot but 



158 THE NEW BIRTH. 

achieve results which God will own. He may 
labor trustfully, for he must succeed. No man 
ever failed who preached thus. The world may 
never know his power ; but he shall know it ; 
and God shall one day proclaim it, at that tribu- 
nal at which shall be fulfilled those words so 
pregnant with the decisions of eternity upon the 
history of the pulpit : ct There are last which 
shall be first, and there are first which shall be 
last." 




CHAPTEE IV. 

RESPONSIBILITY AS RELATED TO SOVEREIGNTY 
IN THE NEW BIRTH. 

HE most serious difficulties of religion 
cluster around certain points of union 
of doctrines which are opposites, but not 
contraries, in the system of truth. They 
stand over against each other for a double pur- 
pose : by their differences each defines the out- 
line and reflects the excellence of the other, and 
by their harmony both magnify the honor of 
the Author of truth, as neither could do alone. 
Such correlative truths are numerous around 
the point of junction of Divine with human 
agencies. The difficulties of our faith therefore 
grow dense around the doctrines of Providence, 
of Prayer, of Predestination, and perhaps most 
of all around that of Eegeneration. The power 
of such difficulties depends very much upon the 

159 



160 THE NEW BIRTH. 

spirit with which they are approached. Three 
principles, especially, should govern inquiry on 
such a theme. 

First, that inquiry should be conducted with 
reverence for the prerogatives of God. It is as 
much the dictate of sober judgment as of a pure 
conscience to preserve that jealousy in behalf of 
the divine honor which the apostle expressed 
when he said : "Let God be true, though every 
man a liar." Again, in such an inquiry we 
should expect to come upon insoluble mystery ; 
not absurdity, but mystery ; not contradictions, 
but mystery. Who knoweth the spirit of a man ? 
A child propounds questions concerning it which 
no man can answer. To whom then will ye liken 
God ? Canst thou by searching find the Almighty 
out unto perfection ? When therefore from two 
such fountains the streams emanate which are * 
commingled in human destiny, shall we expect to 
find nothing that appeals to faith ? In the con- 
fluence of two such powers, is it marvellous that 
to our vision the waters are troubled ? 

Furthermore, in such an inquiry we should be 
content with the removal of practical difficulties. 
It is a principle which the wisest of men have 



FIRST PXIXCIPLES. 161 

acknowledged in respect to other things than 
religion, that perplexities which start out of 
metaphysical science should never be allowed to 
confuse us in the practical affairs of life. Men 
w r ho have believed in the non-existence of mat- 
ter have yet eaten and drunk and slept and 
walked like their neighbors. Men who have 
been unable to see the evidence of their exist- 
ence have yet been very sensitive if other men 
were as ignorant. Yet, in religious inquiry the 
human mind exhibits a proneness to disregard 
this principle of the common sense, by wander- 
ing away from plain matters of fact, and, as 
Isaac Taylor has expressed it, " to beat up and 
down through regions of night, from which their 
only escape must be, by a buoyant effort of 
good sense, to spring up from the abyss to the 
trodden and familiar surface of things." 

With these principles in mind, let us con- 
sider the responsibility of man as related to the 

agency of God in conversion. 
11 



162 THE NEW BIRTH, 

I. 

DIFFICULTIES OF THE SUBJECT PRACTICAL. 

Let us, in the first place, discern clearly the 
reality of the difficulty which an inquiring sin- 
ner often feels respecting his own responsibility 
for a result which is still dependent on Almighty 
power. The difficulty is practical. It is felt 
by minds which know little, and careless, about 
philosophical abstractions. Every pastor is 
familiar with it in the popular experience. No 
inquiry is pressed with deeper solicitude by a 
certain class of minds than this : How can these 
things be? "You tell me," is often the lan- 
guage of their hearts, " you tell me that I must 
be born again. I must have a new heart and a 
new spirit. To produce this change is the work 
of God. You portray this change to me in lan- 
guage which is itself an appalling expression 
of my dependence upon invisible and almighty 
will for its achievement. My puny faculties are 
affrighted at the conception of a change from 
darkness to light, from death to life, and from 
the power of Satan to that of God. Why, then, 



CONVERSION AND DECREE. 163 

do you summon me to any duty in this emer- 
gency? What have I to do but to await the 
revelation of that eternal decree on which my 
destiny hangs in suspense, like that of a mote 
upon the law of gravitation? How can I re- 
pent ? How can I believe ? Am I not shut up 
to this one resource : to stand in dumb agony 
before the Will, as one of your own most ven- 
erable theologians has termed it, the arbitrary 
Will, of God? He hath mercy on whom he 
will have mercy." An oppressive significance 
is sometimes crowded into the words : What 
must I do to be saved ? They are often the 
outburst of a hopeless intellect, as well as of a 
burdened conscience. 

That this is not an extravagant statement of 
the practical character of the difficulties which 
many feel on this subject, will be obvious to 
any one who is familiar with the unrecorded 
experience of inquirers, when they are made to 
stand face to face with the doctrine of the sov- 
ereignty of God in their salvation. 

In confirmation and in illustration of this 
statement, I may be permitted to refer to the 
experience of one who subsequently became a 



164 THE NEW BIRTH. 

preacher. In an unpublished communication to 
a friend, some years after his conversion, he 
wrote respecting this theme as follows : w Few 
subjects open to me a deeper abyss than this. 
The attempt to speak of it recalls to me a period 
of my life when I can truly say : * The pains of 
hell gat hold upon me.' I think I know the 
difficulties of a sinner burdened by his depend- 
ence upon a power out of himself for salvation. 
I have been all over that land of darkness and 
of the shadow of death. I have seen those 
difficulties piled up like Alps on Alps. I recall 
seven months of my life in which my mind beat 
about that thought of dependence upon the grace 
of God without a ray of light or of hope, I 
searched the Scriptures. I read books of devo- 
tion. I conversed with theologians. I ran- 
sacked their libraries for some explanation of 
the mystery which appeared to me then to be a 
contradiction to my natural ideas of justice. 
The gloom it created reached at last every part 
of God's word : I could read no hope there. It 
covered all Nature : I could see no justice there. 
Sleep became more desirable to me than waking. 
The morning only woke me to a consciousness 



CONSCIOUSNESS OF RESPONSIBILITY. 165 

of misery ; and the feeling excited in me by the 
sight of the busy world around me was a kind 
of bitter compassion that so many of them must 
soon end their little dream of life, and then 
awake to a wretchedness as complete as mine." 

n. 

THE SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY AN INTUITION. 

Conceding, then, the practical character of 
the perplexities which often surround the con- 
junction of these two ideas of responsibility 
and of dependence in the way of salvation, let 
us observe that Responsibility, in any develop- 
ment of it, must rest primarily upon a species 
of independent evidence which a sound mind 
cannot resist. A man's own consciousness is 
the root of the matter. God has so constituted 
accountable being, that what it is is wrought 
into the consciousness that it is. Nothing can 
go below this; nothing can outrun this. Sea- 
soning here can add nothing to knowledge. 
Analysis of free-agency can furnish no addi- 
tional evidence of the fact. Dissection of the 
body discovers no evidence of vitality. No 



166 THE NEW BIRTH. 

man can thus* demonstrate his own responsibil- 
ity ; yet no man can rid himself of the convic- 
tion that he is responsible. This is the primal 
conviction of our moral being. It is to moral 
existence what the optic nerve is to the eye. 
It is one of those " high instincts " 

" Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our clay ; 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing : 



Truths that wake 
To perish never, 
Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavor 



Can utterly abolish or destroy." 



It stays by us when we would fling it from us. 
It follows hard after us when we would flee from 
the sight of it. Something holds us to it more 
vigorous than logic. We cannot escape it; it 
is part of us. It is wrought into the structure 
of every language. Philosophers have reasoned 
it down ; they have voted it out of the world 
by sage majorities ; but the world will not let it 
go, nor will it let the world go, so long as the 
word " ought " is intelligible to a sane mind. 



CONSCIENCE A WITNESS. 1G7 

On this basis of knowledge, then, rests the re- 
sponsibility of any man, regarded as the general 
condition of his being. But on the very same 
basis rests the responsibility of an awakened 
sinner for instant, absolute, and entire obedience 
to God's commands ; and this at the very hour 
of his perplexities on the subject of a change of 
heart. No mind can possess more convincing 
evidences of its responsibility than that mind 
which is aroused to ask: "What must I do to 
be saved?" Such a one knows his responsibil- 
ity for everything that God requires of him, as 
with open eye he knows light. Every pang of 
conviction proves this ; every fear proves this. 
He is conscious of guilt in having been a sinner ; 
he is conscious of guilt in being a sinner ; he is 
conscious of guilt in continuing to be .a sinner. 
His w T ant of penitence is a sin to him. His want 
of love to God is a sin to him. The guilt is his 
own ; he feels it rankling in his own soul. God 
could not affirm to him his responsibility more 
distinctly than by the voice of that angered con- 
science. If that truth were written in the 
heavens it could be no more authoritative. A 
revelation of it by one risen from the dead could 



168 THE NEW BIRTH. 

make it no more sacred. He never has a more 
imperative disclosure of it to his soul than when 
his convictions of sin are most homefelt, and his 
fear of eternity most intolerable. Black as may 
be the abyss in which the philosophy of regen- 
eration seems to leave him, he cannot doubt the 
fact of his responsibility for being there, and for 
ceasing to be there at God's bidding. If he 
seems to himself to doubt this, he is like an in- 
sane man who questions his own existence, and 
recounts to you the narrative of his own death 
and burial. The remark of Dr. Johnson upon 
the philosophical question of freedom is as truth- 
ful respecting the feet of a sinner's responsibility 
for all that God requires of him in salvation : 
"A man knows it, sir, and that is the whole of 
it." 

in. 

RESPONSIBILITY NOT DESTROYED BY DEPRAVITY. 

It is instructive to observe the confidence 
which the human mind reposes in its knowledge 
of its own responsibility as this confidence is 
exhibited in the fact, that the common sense of 



GUILT OF INFATUATION. 169 

men never attributes to sin, however passionate 
or obdurate, the power to destroy responsibility. 
The infatuation of guilt never even impairs, in a 
healthy mind, the sense of the enormity of guilt. 
However rooted crime becomes, as if in the very 
nature of the criminal, until we say of him in 
loose dialect : It is his nature to lie, to steal, 
to murder ; he does not know how to do other- 
wise ; evil has possession of him ; he hath a 
devil : yet we never in such modes of speech 
hold a sinner guiltless ; we never loosen the 
gripe of responsibility upon his being. We still 
say, with the wise man : w His own iniquities 
shall take the wicked himself; and he shall be 
holden with the cords of his sins." Penal juris- 
prudence in civilized law is built upon this 
principal. It laughs at the fiction of moral 
insanity as a product of guilt. 

Let this principle be illustrated in an occur- 
rence which is yet fresh in our national history. 
We were told, a few years ago, of a man who 
sat in the councils of the country, the represen- 
tative, as he said, of a gallant people ; we were 
told that, under the impulse of revenge, he vio- 
lated the laws of justice, of honor, of courage, 



170 THE NEW BIRTH. 

and of civilized humanity, of all that a gallant 
people should respect. We heard — and did 
not our ears tingle at the story? — we heard that 
he crept stealthily, and armed to the teeth, into 
the highest legislative sanctuary of the land, and 
there, awaiting his time like an assassin, he 
felled to the floor a solitary, unarmed, and pin- 
ioned man ; a man his superior in age, in official 
rank, in refinement of taste, in classic learning, 
in patriotism, in integrity of conscience, in all 
that can dignify a gentleman and a statesman. 

Yet the gallant assassin told us : "I meant no 
wrong ; I was conscious of no crime ; I purposed 
only to inflict the chastisement which' I would 
give to a servant or a dog." But what was our 
answer? We said by the mouth of one of our 
representatives, as you may remember: "That 
was a brutal and cowardly and murderous deed." 
Yet the noble assassin condescended to say to 
us : * f No, oh no ! you do me wrong; I did not 
know the force of the blows I struck ; it was 
but a reed that I held in my hand ; and that 
first blow aroused the demon in my heart ; after 
that, I knew not what I did ; and it was well 
for him, yes, it was well for him, that he did 



GUILT OF IXFATUATTOX. 171 

not resist my fury." But again, what was our 
answer ? We compressed it with indignant lips ; 
we said of the august assassin : <f He smote his 
victim as Cain, did his brother." 

Did we not believe those words ? Did we not 
hold the man to be a man, and therefore respon- 
sible for his blindfold conscience, and his infuri- 
ated passion, and for all the consequences ? Did 
we not hold him guilty for not knowing what he 
did ? Did we not believe it to have been his 
own spirit that was the demon in his heart? 
Was it not a free demon ? Was it not a volun- 
tary demon ? Was it not a responsible demon ? 
Who believes that he was unable to resist the 
impulses of that demoniacal possession ? When 
the eyes of twenty millions flashed fire, and their 
lips execrated the deed, was it in rebuke of a 
poor lunatic wiio had strayed from the tombs? 
When the echo of those blows came back to us 
from the other side of the Atlantic, in the out- 
cry of the civilized world, from Gibraltar to 
Siberia, against the barbarism of American 
institutions, was it a mistaken cruelty towards 
one whose dwelling was with the beasts of the 
field, and who did eat grass like oxen? Oh no, 



172 THE NEW BIRTH. 

no ! The common conscience of the world an- 
swers, No. The common sense of the world 
responds, No. The reverberation of cannon and 
the tramp of a million armed men have pro- 
tested, No. Impartial history will confirm the 
verdict, No. Thoughtful men, but a few 
months after, stood around an open grave. 
They shut their mouths in awe-struck silence. 
That which had not been told them, they saw; 
that which they had not heard, did they con- 
sider. They thought within themselves : Here 
lies a poor, deluded, blinded, infatuated sinner, 
but still a deluded sinner, a blinded sinner, an 
infatuated sinner. They thought of the verdict 
sometimes rendered at an inquest to which death 
has not given up its secret : " Died by visitation 
of God." Christian minds, the world over, 
when they heard of that untimely end, remem- 
bered God's own decree : " Bloody and deceit- 
ful men shall not live out half their days." And 
all the people said, "Amen." So impossible is 
it to stultify the moral convictions of the world, 
by the figment of a moral responsibility de- 
stroyed by the obduracy or the passionateness 
of guilt. 



THE BIBLICAL THEORY. 173 

IV. 

BIBLICAL THEORY OF RESPONSIBILITY. 

The authority of revelation is added to that 
of conscience in testimony to the *truth before 
us. The Scriptures hold man responsible for a 
compliance with the conditions of salvation. 
They hold him to account for the entire char- 
acter which renders salvation a fact. This has 
never been intelligently questioned. It is one 
of the points of indubitable and unbroken 
alliance between revelation and conscience. 
The word of God is here but the echo of his 
work. The Scriptures hold a sinner, an unre- 
generate sinner, responsible for repentance of 
sin and for faith in Christ, and for everything 
else which is a constituent of a regenerate char- 
acter. No hint is given that this responsibilitj^ 
is at all dependent on the gift of regenerating 
grace. Duties and graces are urged upon the 
natural consciences of men, with no qualification 
whatever. To an unsophisticated reader, men 
seem to be exhorted to repent and believe, to 
love, to trust, to obey, to adore, to praise, to 
be perfect as God is perfect, with the same 



174 THE NEW BIRTH. 

freedom with which they are commanded to re- 
frain from lying, from stealing, from murder. 
The inspired writers treat the whole subject with 
a boldness which is often startling, and yet re- 
freshing, by the side of some of the wary and 
diplomatic methods of catechetical theology. 
They do not seem to have been embarrassed by 
their own equally bold conceptions of the sov- 
ereignty of God. 

One whose mind has wandered over the im- 
mensity of these themes, with no practical object 
bv which to test its convictions, and on which 
to concentrate them, may be astonished at the 
daring with which the inspired writers use the 
truths at which philosophy has stood aghast. 
It is the usual method of inspiration to assume 
the responsibility of a sinner, and to urge upon 
him the duties of repentance, of faith, of sub- 
mission, of perfect obedience, unqualified by 
any mention whatever of his dependence upon 
God. Duty is urged as if a sinner had no con- 
cern with anything else than duty. Yet turn a 
leaf, and we see absolute dependence and eter- 
nal decree unrolled like the scroll of fate, with 
no proviso to save the freedom of a man ; as if 
decree and dependence were the only pillars of , 



BIBLICAL PARADOXES. 175 

God's government. If we are timid lest our 
theological formulae should be unravelled in the 
process, we tremble when we read: "Wash 
you, make you clean " ; " Without me ye can do 
nothing " : "Make to yourselves a new heart" ; 
"Our sufficiency is of God": "Kepent and be 
converted" ; "He hath mercy on whom he will 
have mercy " : " Submit yourselves unto God " ; 
" And whom he will he hardeneth " : " Work 
out your own salvation " ; " It is God that work- 
eth in you": "Awake, thou that sleepest"; 
" The Lord hath poured upon you the spirit of 
a deep sleep " : " Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ"; " God shall send them delusion, that 
they should believe a lie " ; " Turn ye, turn ye, 
for why will ye die ! " " That they all might be 
damned which believe not the truth." 

Pages of these paradoxical responses might 
be compiled from the Scriptures. Are we 
prompt to exclaim : This is more than paradox ; 
it is contradiction? It is such contradiction as 
Paul indulges when he says : " We are deceivers, 
yet true ; unknown, yet well known ; dying, 
yet we live ; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing ; 
poor, yet making many rich ; having nothing, 
yet possessing all things." Such verbal contra-. 



176 THE NEW BIRTH. 

dictions are the profoundest harmonies. They 
are the index of a masculine grasp of truth. It 
is not the way of great souls, moved by great 
truths, to be content with conceptions which can 
be sifted clean of paradox, and their residuum 
measured with algebraic exactness . Great truths 
have caverns of thought which lie below scien- 
tific language ; and great minds are ever explor- 
ing those recesses. Thus it is with inspiration, 
which is only the greatness of divine thought. 
Inspired conception holds these opposites of 
truth with no sense of contradiction. A seren- 
ity of faith pervades the inspired thought upon 
them, like the tranquillity which no tempest 
breaks at the bottom of the Atlantic. When 
such thought comes to be expressed in speech, 
it refuses qualifications and provisoes. It takes 
on bold and craggy forms. It loves the mind 
that dares to speak it outright, and then leave 
it in the majesty of its singleness. Such is the 
celestial calmness with which inspired minds 
have dealt with the responsibility of man. 
They betray no sense of shame at their heed- 
lessness of the divine honor in urging the claims 
of duty with an importunity which seems to 



OBLIGATION AND ABILITY. 177 

forget all else than duty. A doubt of the com- 
pleteness of man's responsibility for the dis- 
charge of his duty, and of the whole of it, is 
never tolerated by them. Those difficulties of 
inquiry which, if they mean anything, signify 
an implication of injustice in holding man ac- 
countable under the law of sovereignty, are met 
with rebuke rather than with reasoning : " Who 
art thou, O man, that repliest against God? " 

v. 

ABILITY THE MEASURE OF OBLIGATION. 

From the authoritative tone with which both 
the consciousness of men and the word of God 
thus teach the responsibility of unregenerate 
mind, we are led to infer the ability of an unre- 
generate sinner to obey all the divine commands 
which are laid upon him. 

What precisely do we mean by this ? That 

an unregenerate mind, remaining unregenerate, 

can obey God ? No ; we do not so trifle with 

contradiction in terms. The carnal mind is not 

subject to the law of God, neither indeed can 

be. A man with closed eyes does not see a 
12 



178 THE NEW BIRTH. 

precipice at mid-clay, neither indeed can he see 
it ; one step therefore may plunge him to the 
bottom. But he can open his eyes ; what then? 
Is there no difference between a man with vol- 
untarily closed eyes and a blind man ? Is there 
none between a man who will not see and a man 
bom blind? So, we do not deny the truism that 
a sinner remaining impenitent cannot repent ; 
he cannot be and not be at the same moment. 
But he can choose not to remain impenitent ; 
what then? Is there no difference between a 
sinner who cannot because he will not repent, 
and a sinner who cannot because he is w disabled " 
to will otherwise ? Is there none between one 
who cannot because he will not and one who is 
born disabled? We use language, then, in the 
strict and proper sense of it, as the common 
mind interprets it, when we affirm the inevita- 
ble inference from human consciousness and the 
word of God, that an unregenerate sinner can 
obey all the commands of God. 

"I CAN, BECAUSE I OUGHT." 

A child's book exists in our Sabbath-school 
literature, with the simple yet profoundly phi!- 



"j CAN, BECAUSE I OUGHT." 179 

osophic title: "I can, because I ought." The 
fresh mind of childhood never denied the truth 
expressed in those words. The conscience of & 
child must be awed down by authority into un- 
natural contortions, before it will create the feel- 
ing or the belief of guilt in that child's heart for 
that which he did not originate and cannot con- 
trol. 

"I can, because I ought:" Ability — the 
necessary inference from obligation ; obligation 
— the measure of ability. The central truth 
which gives value to the tomes of theological 
lore on this subject is compressed into those 
words. It is impossible that reasoning should 
go below it or around it with the purpose of 
evasion. It is ultimate ; thought can go no 
farther. We reason around and around the 
immensity of the theme, and an invisible thread 
conducts us through the labyrinth back to the 
point at which we started, and at which every 
child can see as far as the keenest of us. 

"I can, because I ought : " we struggle to go 
by this truth ; we traverse the universe in our 
philosophic search for something beyond it ; but 
at the circumference of our journey we have not 



180 THE NEW BIRTH. 

outrun it, any more than we can outrun the 
evening star in search for the horizon. We 
plunge into the depths of our own being in quest 
of something which consciousness may have 
treasured up beneath it, but at the bottom of 
all things we find it awaiting us, "a gem of 
purest ray serene." 

"I can, because I ought : " it is one of those 
truths which we carry with us because it is a 
part of us. We cannot look into any mirror of 
truth without seeing the reflection of it. It is 
like an omnipresent Deity. It is indeed the 
voice of God within us. We may say of it : 
* Thou hast beset me behind and before ; thou 
hast laid thy hand upon me. Whither shall I 
go from thy spirit ? whither shall I flee from thy 
presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art 
there ; if I make my bed in hell, behold thou 
art there ; if I take the wings of the morning 
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even 
there shall thy hand lead me : yea, the darkness 
and the light are both alike to thee. Thou 
hast possessed my reins : I am fearfully and 
wonderfully made." 

"I can, because I ought." This, then, is the 



ABILITY AND COMMON SENSE. 181 

conviction with which an inquiring sinner must 
meet the question of his own salvation. I can 
obey, because God requires me to obey. I can 
repent, because I feel guilty for not repenting. 
God would not demand of me to do what I. can- 
not do. God would never have so constituted 
my being that I must feel guilty for not doing 
what I cannot do. 

ABILITY, THE TEACHING OF COMMON SENSE. 

This is the irresistible reasoning of any un- 
sophisticated mind. The common sense of the 
world reasons so without hesitation and without 
exception. Teach your child that he has lied to 
you because he could not help it, and will he 
justify your rod ? Teach a thief that he stole 
because the necessity of his avaricious nature 
was upon him, and will he look up self-con- 
demned to your barred windows and bolted 
doors and armed .sentinels ? Teach a murderer 
that he shed the blood of his victim because he 
was the victim of an insane malignity over which 
he had no power, and will he confess the awful 
excellence of justice on your scaffold? If he 



182 TEE NEW BIRTH. 

does, it will be simply because lie knows better 
than your teachings. 

So, proclaim to an inquiring sinner that he is 
a sinner because he cannot be anything else ; 
that he hates God because it is his nature to 
hate God ; that he is a depraved being and a 
child of wrath because he was born such ; that 
he does not repent because he is impotent to 
repent ; that he does not obey God because the 
power is not in him to obey God ; that there- 
fore if he is not saved it is because God has not 
elected him to salvation ; and will he feel the 
damning guilt of his condition, the equity of his 
doom, the awful righteousness of the coming 
judgment? If he does so, it will be because 
conscience and the Holy Ghost are mightier 
than your theology. Never, never does reason 
draw such conclusion from such premises. The 
common sense of the world never reasons so. 

The common sense, moreover, refuses to be 
mystified in its reasonings by any distinction 
between power in character and power in act ; 
between power to be and power to do. To the 
popular mind, if a man cannot he cannot ; and 
that is the end of it. Obligation, guilt, just 



ABILITY AXD COMMON SENSE. 183 

condemnation, remorse, punishment honorable 
to law — not one of these can co-exist with im- 
potence in the being of whom they are affirmed. 
No matter whether the sinfulness in question be 
innate depravity or that of an act of murder ; 
the reasoning of the common sense is the same. 
Inability to be all that God requires is a bar to 
the justice of requirement, as absolute as ina- 
bility to withhold the stroke of a dagger is to 
the justice of the gibbet. An "insane mur- 
derer " is no more an impossible contradiction 
in any civilized court of law than a " disabled 
sinner" is at the bar of God. We count it to 
the honor of our humane civilization that our 
asylums, more sacred than " cities of refuge " 
from the avenger of blood, are thrown open to 
the insane homicide, and he is reverently cared 
for as a brother on whom the hand of God rests. 
If then it be conceivable that, anywhere in the 
universe, there are moral beings who are "dis- 
abled unto all good," shall not He whose ways 
are equal and whose name is Love find, some- 
where among the still planets, a retreat where 
those afflicted spirits may hide themselves till 
their tangled and broken faculties shall be al- 



184 THE NEW BIRTH. 



lured back again into symmetry and wholeness? 
Shall such beings be left to call on the rocks and 
mountains to hide them from the face of Him 
that sitteth on the throne ? Whose reason would 
not reel if this were true ? 

Thus, be it repeated, thus reasons the common 
sense of men. There is no sense in reasoning 
otherwise. If the opposite conviction is estab- 
lished, it must be by authority, not by reason- 
ing. But it is unsafe to question, on any author- 
ity, such a primal conviction of the soul. It is 
hazardous to the integrity of mind in all its 
operations. It hoodwinks perception of right 
and wrong. It blunts sensibility to good and 
evil. It deadens, therefore, the soul's response 
to the nature of God as a God of equity and of 
judgment. 

Moreover, such a denial of the mind's neces- 
sary belief is unphilosophical. So to use any 
conceivable authority as to array it by sheer 
power against a first principle of belief, is to 
defeat that very authority in the very act of its 
assertion ; for the foundation of all authority 
over intelligent belief is inundated and swept 
away in the process. Faith has then no more 



"J CA2? BECAUSE I OUGHT." 185 

bottom to stand on than reason. Both go to 
wreck together. If I cannot trust one neces- 
sary belief, I cannot another. I have nothing 
left, on which to build faith in a revelation. 
My soul then sinks in unbelief to depths im- 
measurable, in which all that it knows is that it 
knows nothing, believes nothing, hopes nothing. 
To borrow a similitude, such denial of ability 
to obey a command of God is, to the whole 
structure of a moral being, like the magnetic 
mountain to the navigator in the Arabian story. 
As he sailed alongside of it, it drew out the 
clamping-irons of his vessel, and the timbers 
fell asunder, and the ship was wrecked, though 
in still waters on a summer's day. 

Once more, "I can, because I ought." We 
cast reflection upon God's honor if we deny this 
in respect of obedience to his commands in the 
way of salvation. We implicate the word of 
God in a collision with his works ; and we in- 
volve his work, in the structure of a soul, in a 
more awful conflict with itself. We should be 
jealous for the divine prerogative in this thing. 
Shall the thing formed have reason to say unto 



186 THE NEW BIRTH. 

Him that formed it : " Why hast thou made me 
thus?" 

"VI. 

RESPONSIBILITY AND SOVEREIGNTY HARMONIOUS. 

We are prepared, then, to observe that in this 
view of responsibility there is no conflict with 
the truth of a sinner's dependence upon the Holy 
Spirit. Reason affirms no conflict here any more 
than revelation. If a sinner is not dependent 
on regenerating grace for ability to do his duty, 
he is not dependent on regenerating grace for 
anything that is essential to responsibility for the 
performance of his duty. If dependence is not 
for the power but for the will to obey, reason 
has no more difficulty than faith in determin- 
ing responsibility. Not only is no contradiction 
proved, but none is suggested between respon- 
sibility and dependence. We cannot properly 
speak of reconciling these truths ; we can dis- 
cern no variance between them to be removed. 
Our conceptions of them fall into the same ease 
and harmony of thought in which they seem to 
have lain in inspired minds. 



THE DEPENDENCE OF GUILT. 187 

The dependence of a being who is responsible 
because able to do all that God requires of him, 
is no more the dependence of necessity, but the 
dependence of sheer guilt. It is not the de- 
pendence of a diseased man upon the herb that 
shall restore him. It is not the dependence of 
a disabled man upon the surgeon who shall set 
the broken limb. It is not the dependence of 
the man with a withered hand upon the miracle 
that shall make it w r hole like the other. It is 
the dependence of a perverse man, who of him- 
self will not be other than a perverse man, upon 
the power that shall incline him to obedience. 
It is the dependence of a liar, w T ho of himself 
will not be other than a liar, upon the influences 
that induce him to be truthful. It is the de- 
pendence of a murderer, who of himself will 
not be other than a murderer, upon the friend 
who shall persuade him to put up his dagger 
into its sheath. This, which in kind, and when 
applied to elemental changes of character, is the 
most profound and terrific dependence under 
which a moral being can exist, stands side by 
side with responsible being, with no collision, 
with not a breath of discord between them. 



188 THE NEW BIRTH. 

The two thoughts are like angels locked hand in 
hand, in ministering to God's will and vindi- 
cating his ways to men. 

Is it still said that mystery hangs over the 
whole conception of a being who can bnt will 
not be other than a sinner until God constrains 
him ? True ; it is the great marvel of the uni- 
verse that any being will not obey God. Is it 
said that mystery covers the junction of Divine 
influence with human power in the change of a 
sinner's heart? True; and the savage fled in 
terror from the artist's studio when he first saw 
his own portrait, because he could not under- 
stand the mystery of the artist's pencil, which 
could so represent him on the canvas without 
abstracting a part of him. Is it said that mys- 
tery buries in darkness the turning-point of 
character at which a sinner becomes a changed 
being ; a sinner who now, without God, will 
not be other than a sinner, yet then, through 
God, is a believer ; who now will not but be a 
child of wrath, yet then is an heir of glory ; 
that we cannot penetrate to the heart of this ? 
True ; great is the mystery of godliness. And 
not unlike this mystery is the fact that a man 



MYSTERY NOT ABSURDITY. 189 

cannot see the power of his own vision ; cannot 
look at the nerve which lies back of his own 
eyeball; cannot take in his hand the filament 
which connects that nerve with the spiritual seer 
who is behind it. But mystery is not contra- 
diction. It is not even a seeming contradiction. 
An apparent absurdity is an absurdity to us 
until we believe, and have reason to believe, it 
to be only apparent. Mystery is not this ; it is 
only a hint of magnitude. We must fall back, 
therefore, upon the conviction of responsibility 
for guilt, and of the dependence of guilt, as 
upon two of the elemental truths on which rests 
the government of God over our world. We 
may think and speak of them at our ease, with- 
out the most secret suspicion of their inconsist- 
ency, or fear of a collision. We may preach 
them as inspired men have preached them, with 
intensity of conception, with boldness of speech, 
with singleness of aim. These are the only 
methods in which they can be preached by men 
who are in earnest. 



190 THE NEW BIRTH. 



YH. 



HOW TO ANSWER THE INQUIRY, " WHAT MUST I BO 
TO BE SAVED1" 

Some of the results of this discussion bear 
specifically upon the methods of the pulpit and 
of Christian teachers in addressing inquirers 
after the way of salvation. 

The answer to the inquiry, w What must I do 
to be saved ? " would appear to be very simple 
in view of the history of the inquiry in the 
Scriptures. There % it is the inquiry of unso- 
phisticated minds, and the outburst of bur- 
dened hearts. No philosophic theories of con- 
version, venerated as the growth of ages, lay 
back of it. It came forth, fresh from souls which 
were in downright earnest to do something for 
their salvation, if they might but know what to 
do. They were satisfied, therefore, and the in- 
spired teacher assumed that they ought to be 
satisfied, with an answer which was as direct, as 
earnest, and as free from mysticism as their 
question was. 

It needs hardly to be said, that modern inquir- 
ers after the way of salvation, in Christian lands 
at least, come to the subject in a very different 
way. They approach it through the avenue of a 



PERPLEXITIES OF INQUIRERS. 191 

different mental history. The novelty of Chris- 
tian thought is commonly worn away before they 
reach that crisis in which the question of reli- 
gious destiny is to be decided. They bring to 
it a multitude of preconceptions. Inherited 
beliefs, the mental deposits of education, and the 
relics of former religious awakenings are min- 
gled with the mental habits of impenitence. 
The true and the false are intertwined intri- 
cately. Inquiry itself, under such conditions, is 
not free from sophistry. The stereotyped lan- 
guage in which it expresses itself may be more 
largely an imitation than an experience. It 
may not mean all that it seems to mean. 

The work of a religious teacher, therefore, in 
the instruction of religious inquirers, is often one 
of delicate complications. Simple as it is in its 
results, it bas no such simplicity in its methods 
as if we were at liberty to inundate the whole 
past of the inquirer's mind and sweep it away by 
teaching the rudiments of a new religion. We 
must save to him much that is true and salutary 
in his experience. Yet we must often extricate 
him from mental confusion, by clearing his way 
back to certain first principles of truth, which 



192 THE NEW BIRTH. 

his experience has obscured. Several of these 
principles are very clearly established by the 
present discussion. 

REPENTANCE AND FAITH PRACTICABLE, LIKE OTHER DUTIES. 

One such principle is, that we should urge 
upon men the performance of the conditions of 
salvation, with the same unrestricted freedom of 
speech with which we would press the discharge 
of any other duty. 

Men should be invited, persuaded, entreated, 
commanded to repent and believe, with the same 
unqualified boldness with which we should teach 
them to speak the truth, to pay an honest debt, to 
befriend the widow and the fatherless. Respon- 
sibility is as perfect in the one class of duties as 
in the other. Duty is as absolute. The re- 
sponsibility in both cases rests upon the same 
immutable basis — the intrinsic justice of a Di- 
vine command, and the indestructible ability of 
man to obey. The sinner is responsible for re- 
pentance and faith to the full extent of Divine 
requirement, simply because God requires them 
and because the sinner is able to render them. 

We should seek to penetrate with this con- 
viction the soul of every man who would know 



IX ABILITY A FICTION. 193 

what he must do to be saved. We owe it to 
the simplicity of the truth to clear it of contra- 
dictions in the troubled thoughts of an inquirer. 
We should strip it of factitious mystery. We 
should let the absolute sacredness of Duty, 
backed by the sanctions of Eternity, come home 
to the conscience in words simple and few, 
without qualification or proviso. 

The fiction of inability to obey a command 
of God, with which an inquiring mind is often 
blinded, should be commonly treated as a Sa- 
tanic suggestion. That conviction of inability 
does not exist often in such a mind in the forms 
of metaphysic and theologic statement, in which 
technical definition makes the fiction a truth. 
A mind oppressed by fear of hell is in no mood, 
commonly, to appreciate our philosophical dis- 
tinction between "natural" and "moral" ina- 
bility. The plea of inability by which a con- 
victed sinner parries duty, exists in the plain, 
homely sense of words which mean to the dis- 
tracted soul just what they seem to mean in 
literal speech. " Cannot," is " cannot ; " nothing 
more, nothing less. It conveys but one idea! 
That idea has to him no metaphysical double 

13 



194 THE NEW BIRTH. 

sense. It is intensely literal, and as intensely 
false. It arrays Conscience and Fact, God and 
Truth, in defiant hostility to each other. The 
sinner says to his soul : w God commands me to 
do this thing — I cannot ; God commands me to 
repent — I cannot ; God commands me to be- 
lieve — I cannot. He commands, knowing that 
I cannot obey. It is as if he commanded me 
to restore the lost Pleiad." This conviction, 
we repeat, in this unscientific form in which it 
holds inquiring souls in bondage, should be 
treated as a stupendous delusion. The inquirer 
should be thrown back upon the imperative 
teachings of the Scriptures and of the common 
sense. He should be made to feel that in cher- 
ishing such a sense of impotence he is clinging 
to the refuge of a falsehood. He is stultifying 
his own reason, defying his own conscience, and 
charging God with crime. We have no right, 
my brethren, we have no right as teachers of 
truth, to suffer a sinner to go from our instruc- 
tions to the bar of God, in the dilemma of either 
falsifying his reason or repudiating his con- 
science, and therefore with all the forces of 
truth thrown into panic in his soul, through the 



inability a fiction; 195 

contradiction of his necessary beliefs to our 
delivery of God's commands. 

It is unphilosophical and unsafe, as well as 
unscriptural, to teach the duty of repentance 
less imperatively than inspired men have taught 
it. We have no authority to lengthen or to 
soften the peremptory words of the Holy Ghost. 
We should not so far yield to the fiction of ina- 
bility as to say to the inquiring sinner : K Repent 
if you can ; try to repent ; repent of such sins 
as you can repent of; use the means of repent- 
ance ; pray that you may be enabled to repent " ; 
and to say no more. It is neither reasonable 
nor scriptural to entice a sinner up thus to a 
side-look upon his duty, and leave him there. 
He should be led around to the front, and urged 
to face the truth in its imperative singleness — 
" Repent " ; and this with the full force of the 
implication, and if need be the statement, that 
he can repent. With Divine grace or without 
it, regenerate or unregenerate, elect or non- 
elect, his responsibility is as perfect as God can 
make it. Radically, it does not depend on 
Divine grace. Temptation does not fundamen- 
tally affect it. w God doth not suffer you to be 



196 THE NEW BIRTH. 

tempted above that ye are able." The unregen- 
erate sinner should be taught that he has the 
power to do anything which God has the will 
to command. We never get the unbroken force 
of Conscience over to the side of truth other- 
wise. 

THE DEPENDENCE OE GUILT MORE ABSOLUTE THAN THE 
DEPENDENCE OE NECESSITY. 

But is not the teaching of an unqualified 
responsibility perilous ? Will not a sinner be 
tempted to revel in his freedom? Will he not 
say within himself : " My soul is my own ; sal- 
vation is in my own power ; I have but to will 
it, and Heaven is at my bidding ; Soul, thou 
hast much goods laid up for many years in this 
power to repent at thy pleasure ; take thine 
ease " ? Perhaps so ; what distortion will not 
sin prompt in evasion or in caricature of truth ? 
Yet God does not therefore abolish the perils 
of probation. It were sufficient to say that He 
who spake as never man spake thus preached 
repentance in bold and unguarded words. But 
here, as elsewhere, truth carries its own safe- 
guards. For, — 

A second consequence of the principles we 



SOVEREIGNTY OF POWER. 197 

have considered is, that we should proclaim the 
dependence of a sinner upon the Holy Ghost for 
the will to repent, as being a more profound 
reality than if it were dependence for the power 
to repent. 

Two methods are here suggested regarding 
the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty. They may 
have the same end in view, may be adopted with 
equal conscientiousness, and may be prompted 
by the same devout desire to honor God. Yet 
they are very unequal in the depth to which 
they penetrate truth, and the force with which 
they use it. They are very dissimilar also in the 
skill with which they avoid perversions of the 
truth in the result. The one method is, to exalt 
the sovereignty of God in salvation as a work of 
mere Power. The other is, to exalt the sover- 
eignty of God in salvation as a work of Moral 
Government. In the one case, God is made to 
appear sovereign of a sinner's destiny, as he is 
of the elements in a tempest. He can say to 
the passions of guilt, Be still ; and they shall 
obey him. His sway of the soul is like his 
sway of the sea. Both are exhibitions of power 
— grand, magnificent, overwhelming it may be, 



198 THE NEW BIRTH. 

but still power, and that only. The final im- 
pression of the beholder is that of the glory of 
Omnipotence. 

In the other case, God is represented as sov- 
ereign in the work of salvation under the con- 
ditions of a moral system. He ordained those 
conditions from eternity. They are sacred to 
him. His own integrity is pledged to them. 
He cannot violate them with impunity to his 
own consciousness of rectitude. They were 
planned in the counsels of eternity for the dis- 
play of his moral glory as supreme over his nat- 
ural perfections. His sway of a soul, therefore, 
is unique. It is like nothing else in the heavens 
above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters 
under the earth. It is not an exercise of power 
only. The final impression upon a beholder is 
not that of omnipotence supremely, but of 
omnipotence in the service of justice, holiness, 
truth, love. It is that of infinite power regu- 
lated by infinite integrity. The perspective of 
the system is so adjusted that the spectator shall 
look through the natural to the moral disclos- 
ures of the Divine glory. He sees, not unlim- 
ited Force driving before it an insensate thing, 



SOVEREIGNTY OF RIGHT. 199 

but infinite Holiness swaying a free mind, 
through all the sinuosities of its choice, by the 
delicate, intricate, and balanced working of 
moral laws. 

Now, the difference between these two meth- 
ods of representing the sovereignty of God in 
salvation is vital. It corresponds to the differ- 
ence between Might and Eight. It is just the 
difference between appeal to the sense of weak- 
ness and appeal to the sense of sin. It is vitally 
significant to religious teaching in several re- 
spects. In the first place, we can much more 
easily impress upon men a sense of the sover- 
eignty of might than that of the sovereignty of 
right. A fallen mind takes in the idea of a God 
of power more spontaneously than that of a God 
of rectitude. Again, an awakened soul, agitated 
by fear, is specially receptive of the truth of 
Divine Power; yet that soul goaded by re- 
morse, and quick to spring to anything that 
shall help it to fling elsewhere the load of its 
guilt, is specially impervious to the truth of 
Divine integrity. A God sovereign by might 
is less uncongenial with the bitterness of its 
spirit than a God sovereign by right. Still 



200 THE NEW BIRTH. 

further, the drift of a tempted soul is to accept 
the conviction of God's power at the expense of 
his justice. The leanings of guilt are all one 
way. Subjection to an infinite tyranny is less 
revolting to it than submission to infinite equity. 
Is there, then, no peril indicated here to our 
conceptions of Divine Sovereignty ? Is there no 
danger that the scriptural proportions of truth 
may become distorted in the portraiture we 
draw of the Divine government ? What if, in 
our solicitude to exalt the power of God, we so 
depict it that we unwittingly elevate it above his 
holiness ? Is there no danger then ? What if 
we so imperiously proclaim his omnipotence 
over a guilty soul that the practical impression 
upon that soul obscures all sense of his equity, 
his sincerity, his honor, his love? Is there no 
risk then? What if we so speak as God's 
vicegerents, that, though unconscious of any 
such design, we throw out discordant fragments 
of the truth this way and that, and they happen 
to fall in with the cavils of a tempted spirit, and 
seem to consolidate its sense of sheer dominion 
at the expense of all the holy and amiable attri- 
butes of God in his moral government ? Is there 



HELPLESSXESS OF SIX. 201 

no hazard there ? TThat if, to make sure that 
the Divine authority shall not be understated, 
we seem, though we should be shocked by the 
imputation of any such purpose, yet we seem to 
the common sense of our hearers to build God's 
government upon principles which would doom 
any human government on earth to execration ? 
Is there no peril in that? 

Yet, from these two methods of regarding 
Divine sovereignty arise corresponding methods 
of representing the dependence of a sinner upon 
the Holy Spirit for salvation. By the one 
method, it is the dependence of necessity ; by 
the other, the dependence of guilt. The depend- 
ence is absolute in either case. No interest of 
truth is served by i^norins: or retrenching that. 
So long as a sinner will not repent without 
Divine grace, his dependence upon that grace is 
as perfect in degree, though not the same in 
kind, as if he could not repent. But because it 
is not the same in kind, the moral significance 
of it is unspeakably the more intense. As 
necessity knows no law, so the dependence of 
necessity knows no guilt. It has no moral sig- 
nificance. Xot so the dependence which our 



202 THE NEW BIRTH. 

subject teaches. The very groundwork of this 
is guilt, and guilt only. Thus we should pro- 
claim it. We should so sketch a sinner's de- 
pendence upon the Holy Ghost as to keep the 
moral rectitude of God in the foreground of his 
power. The helplessness of which we seek to 
make the sinner conscious should be, not the 
helplessness of disease, but the helplessness of 
sin. We should picture him to his own con- 
science, not primarily as infirmity leaning upon 
infinite strength, but as guilt resting against 
infinite holiness. We should portray a depend- 
ence which can give him no peace so long as he 
remains impenitent. It should be a dependence 
which brings together all the elements of God's 
moral government to intensify the holiness of 
God on the one hand, and on the other the sin- 
fulness of sin. It should heap the whole burden 
of sin upon the sinner's own will. 

Our teaching, then, should be clear and bold 
in its implications, and if need be in its asser- 
tions, of this dependence of guilt, and of guilt 
only, while impenitence holds out. Our exhor- 
tations to an impenitent sinner should imply, 
and if needful say to him : w You can repent ; 



GRACE NOT JUSTICE. 203 

you can turn to Gocl ; you ought to do it ; by 
every principle of equity and of honor, he holds 
you responsible for doing it; but this is the 
very head and front of your offending, that 
you will not do it till his grace constrains you. 
It depends, therefore, upon his sovereign will 
whether you shall be saved or lost. The more 
profound your guilt the more absolute is your 
dependence ; and the more absolute your de- 
pendence the more aggravated is your guilt. 
Each is the gauge of the other. Time consoli- 
dates both. Left to yourself, therefore, you 
must more surely perish, and more hopelessly, 
than if you could not repent. The climax of 
your peril is in resistance to the Holy Ghost. 
Years in ease are years of defiance to infinite 
holiness. The one sin which shall not be for- 
given, neither in this world nor in the world to 
come, is sin against the Holy Ghost. There is 
a sin unto death ; I do not say that ye should 
pray for it." 

GRACE NOT JUSTICE. 

But are not such conceptions of dependence 
and guilt rcpellant? Do they not shock hope? 



204 THE NEW BIRTH. 

Does not such teaching therefore invite despair ? 
Yes, if impenitence be incorrigible. Truth and 
sin are implacable foes. It is one of the perils 
of their contact that it may hasten the catas- 
trophe of a soul's ruin. Yet here, again, truth 
provides its own defences by suggesting all the 
alleviation of its terrors which can be beneficent 
to a sinner in his impenitence. Not only are 
his cavils against the rectitude of God's govern- 
ment silenced, but, 

A third result from the principles we have 
reviewed is, that we are at liberty to proclaim 
the offer of the Holy Spirit to the sinner as 
being in unqualified language the gift of God's 
mercy. We present it not as the gift of justice 
to necessity ; not even as the gift of pity to 
misfortune ; but as the gift of mercy to guilt. 
Were man's dependence upon God in regenera- 
tion a dependence for power to repent, regen- 
eration could be only an act of justice — noth- 
ing more. Grace should be no more grace. 
If we must say to an awakened sinner : " True, 
you cannot obey God, but the Holy Spirit can 
enable you to obey ; you have no power to 
repent, but the Holy Spirit can give you repent- 



THE GIFT OF MERCY TO GUILT. 205 

ance ; you have no ability to believe, but the 
Holy Spirit can give you faith ; " the reply is 
inevitable : " Then the gift of the Holy Spirit is 
my right in equity ; I have a claim in eternal 
justice to regeneration, if commands are laid 
upon me which I cannot obey without it. Im- 
possible duties are the demand of tyranny." To 
inquiring minds this reasoning is as resistless as 
lightning. They are astonished that it does not 
strike the pulpit dumb. 

But we preach the gospel of salvation with no 
such lurid logic in the back-ground. We are free to 
proclaim the work of the Holy Ghost as the gift 
of Mercy to Guilt. Behold what manner of love 
the Father hath bestowed ! While we are yet 
sinners, grace comes to our deliverance. The 
sinner in the very act of sin, at the very height 
of rebellion, able to yield, but persistent in 
treason, with power calling upon guilt and guilt 
responding to power, is overtaken, enclosed, 
and subdued by regenerating love. Such is the 
reach of infinite mercy. Let us be jubilant in 
proclaiming the gift of the Holy Ghost as a 
token, superadded to the gift of Christ, of the 
sincerity of God in his desire to save lost men. 



206 THE NEW BIRTH 

Let us exult in the strains of Biblical invitation, 
promise, expostulation. The gift of the Holy 
Spirit is proof in act that they mean just what 
they seem to mean : "Ho, every one that thirst- 
cth ; The Spirit and the Bride say come ; Who- 
soever will, let him come ; I have no pleasure 
in the death of the wicked ; Why will ye die ? " 

ENCOURAGEMENT TO IMMEDIATE REPENTANCE. 

But after all, will not such teaching fail 
through want of individuality in a sinner's faith 
in it? Will he not say: "True, God is infi- 
nitely holy and infinitely merciful ; but what is 
that to me? How do I know that he purposes 
to regenerate me? Must I not await his time 
for my salvation? Is not the dependence of 
guilt just as hopeless as the dependence of 
necessity ? Is not the certainty of sin the cer- 
tainty of damnation?" Yes; if a sinner will 
have it so. But truth benignly pursues him 
even to his selfish isolation in his guilt. For, 

A fourth result of the principles we have dis- 
cussed is, that we are free to assure men that 
they have every encouragement to immediate 



ENCOURAGEMENTS TO REPENTANCE. 207 

repentance which is possible to a state of sin. 
Holy encouragement is not possible to hope in 
incorrigible guilt. But a sinner, once convinced 
of sin, has all the encouragement that he can 
have to immediate action in the duty of repent- 
ance. He has the assurance of the benignity of 
God's command to repent; of his own ability 
to obey ; of the complacency of God in every 
desire he cherishes to obey ; of the co-working 
of the Holy Spirit even in every conviction he 
feels that he ought to obey ; of the sincerity of 
the Spirit in the very pressure of which he is 
conscious of the motives to obey ; and of the 
possibility that even now the Spirit may over- 
power his guilt, and make him willing to obey. 
Beyond this, holy encouragement cannot ex- 
tend. No honest soul will ask for more than 
this. If a sinner accepts other cheer than this, 
it is because his is not an honest soul. Any- 
thing less or more than this simple urgency of 
immediate duty in reliance upon the Holy Ghost, 
would only deepen the hopelessness of a sinner 
in his guilt. No other exhortation comes right 
home to his emergency as this does : " Work, 
for God worketh in thee." This is no mockery. 



208 THE NEW BIRTH. 

It is intensely real, as expressing both God's 
sincerity and the sinner's duty. The practical 
force of that much-abused exhortation is simply 
this : Be in earnest to save yourself, because 
God is in earnest to save you. Salvation, then, 
is sure, in the act of instant repentance. This 
is what the sinner must do to be saved. 

But is the inquiry still pressed : Will the 
Holy Spirit certainly bless my endeavors ? We 
answer : What endeavors ? The endeavors of 
guilt to evade the consciousness of guilt? No. 
When He the Spirit of truth is come, he will 
reprove the world of sin. But again, what 
endeavors ? Endeavors to be saved in the in- 
dulgence of sin ? No : the fruit of the Spirit is 
in all goodness and righteousness and truth. 
But again, what endeavors? Endeavors to 
fasten the responsibility of sin and its fruits 
upon the sovereignty of God's decrees ? Nay, 
but who art thou, O man, that repliest against 
God? Yet again, what endeavors? The en- 
deavors of an earnest spirit to believe and love 
and obey ? Thus saith the high and lofty One 
who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy : 



THE UNKNOWN DECREE. 209 

* I dwell with him that is of a contrite and hum- 
ble spirit." 

But does a sinner say : w Mine is not a con- 
trite spirit ; can I then be assured that God will 
give me repentance ? Is that irreversible decree, 
formed before the world was, anywhere revealed 
to me that, taking me just as I am, God will 
change my heart?" We answer, No. God 
gives no such assurance. He reveals no such 
decrees. He has no answer to give to such 
inquiry. We listen, as that cry goes up to the 
throne of mercy, and there is silence in heaven. 
We hear no responses in the air ; we see no 
handwriting in the clouds. He hath mercy oa 
whom he will have mercy : 

" Not Gabriel asks the reason why, 
Nor God the reason gives." 

This is the point precisely to which the whole 
bearing of our instructions should conduct men 
in their search for peace to their souls — that 
they stand face to face with God, dependent for 
eternal life upon his good pleasure, with every 
possible encouragement, even to the assurance 

14 



210 THE NEW BIRTH. 

of salvation, in instant obedience to his com- 
mands, and with nothing but despair in disobe- 
dience or in delay. What God purposes to do 
respecting the regeneration of any soul he has 
not revealed to any mortal ear. He does not 
ask our attention nor invite our inquiries to that 
secret of his own will. He urges upon our 
thoughts our own doing ; what we have done, 
what we must do. There is no secret about 
that ; it is open and clear as the morning. 

THE RUIN OF A SOUL ITS OWN WORK. 

But what if such proclamation of the gospel 
fails ? What if its only fruit is to awaken the 
lamentation : " To whom is the arm of the Lord 
revealed?" Even then, truth is its own vindi- 
cation, and the ways of God are equal. For, 

The final consequence from the principles we 
have contemplated is, that we should represent 
a sinner's destruction to be always his own doing. 
We may be called to portray the history of the 
Holy Spirit's work on many souls in the words 
once dropped in tears over Jerusalem : " How T 
often would I but ye would not." Our 



HISTORY OF A LOST SOUL. 211 

teaching should be, that it does not extenuate a 
lost sinner's guilt that God never decreed to 
regenerate him. Where is the sinner's claim to 
that decree? Not in defect of responsibility; 
that has been without fracture from the first to 
the last. Not in default of knowledge ; his 
knowledge and his duty have but measured each 
other. Not in bondage of probation ; his pro- 
bation never rose above the level of his freedom. 
Not in severity of temptation*; temptation at its 
floodtide was but opportunity for more blessed 
achievement. His liberty to obey God's com- 
mands was infinitely more sacred in God's sight 
than in his own. Never was its awful sanctity 
suspended or overborne for one moment. God 
has guarded it as the apple of his eye. To no 
being in the universe, then, is the perdition of a 
sinner to be primarily ascribed but to himself. 

But this is not all. We must proclaim the 
history of a lost soul in words of more intense 
significance. That is not a history of negative 
probation. God has never thrust a sinner upon 
trial in the sheer strength of his freedom, and 
let him alone. God has been more than just to 
him. By the very conditions of his being, the 



212 TEE NEW BIRTH, 

sinner has been the object of all the amiable 
affections of the Divine nature. He has been 
placed upon an infinitely beneficent system of 
trial. He has been instructed in all that God 
has held him accountable for ; his own intuitions 
have taught him ; the works of God have en- 
lightened him ; his own conscience has been the 
foreshadow of the judgment to him ; there has 
never been an hour of his moral being when he 
did not know enough for his salvation. Every- 
thing that he has known of God has assumed also 
the benign form of a dissuasive from sin ; his ex- 
perience has generated countless motives to obe- 
dience ; his steps have been thronged by them 
as by pleading spirits ; but for his guilt, his 
conscience alone would have been an ever- 
present song of God's love to him ; if he has 
had Christian training, the disclosures of re- 
demption have opened upon him the most in- 
tense system of allurements to holiness known 
to the universe ; the teachings of wise men, the 
prayers of good men, the visions of inspired 
men, and the ministrations of angels, have 
stretched a cordon of holy sympathies around 
him ; the cross of Christ has blocked his way 



HISTORY OF A LOST SOUL. 213 

to destruction more impassably than by a flam- 
ing sword; intercession in heaven has been 
made for him with hands uplifted in which were 
the prints of the nails ; the Holy Spirit has 
striven with him to turn him back, by all the 
devices which infinite ingenuity could frame at 
the bidding of infinite compassion ; his history 
has been one long struggle against obstacles to 
the suicide of his soul; silently, darkly, often 
with conscious and wilful repugnance to holy 
restraints, yet as often with that adroit suspense 
of conscience with which a sinner may serenely, 
even joyously, fraternize with sin, he has sought 
out, and discovered, and selected, and seized 
upon, and made sure of, his own way over and 
around and through those obstacles, to the world 
of despair. He has done it — he, and not 
another. Such is every lost life. Is it any 
marvel that a lost soul is speechless ? 




CHAPTER V. 

THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

is one of the perils of probation that the 
most stupendous truths may become the 
least impressive. In religious thought 
such are the truths with which we become 
most familiar ; and through our familiarity with 
them, our intellects may grow drowsy over them ; 
and through the dulness of our conceptions our 
hearts my become torpid in response to them. 
By a subtile law of language the words which 
express such truths may become tame. Intense 
words, once the utterance of an intense experi- 
ence, may lose their heat; figurative words, 
originated to express vivid ideas which could 
not otherwise be pressed into language, may 
die out in literal commonplace. We may read 
and speak and pray, therefore, as we may think, 

214 



THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 215 

of some of the grandest ideas of our faith, with- 
out emotion, because without a lifelike sense of 
their reality. They may become that which we 
so significantly describe as "a dead letter." An 
apostolic earnestness, admonishing us of such a 
truth, may startle us into a momentary vision 
of it, by addressing us as if we had lost our 
faith in it ; as if we had sunk into ignorance of 
its existence. " Know ye not ? " may be the query 
which hints at the deadness of our sensibility. 

Let us seek to quicken our thoughts of one of 
these well-known elements of Christian truth, 
by observing some of the lessons suggested by 
the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in regenerate 
souls. "Know ye not that ye are the Temple 
of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in 
you?" 

The work of the Holy Ghost in regeneration 
suggests with singular impressiveness, 

i. 

THE SACREDNESS OF A CHRISTIANS BEIXG. 

A renewed mind is a consecrated thing. It is 
sacred as the abode of God. In all history, a 



216 THE NEW BIRTH. 

temple has been an object of reverence as the 
dwelling-place of Deity. Men close its cloors 
against profane intrusion. They put off their 
shoes and approach it with prostrations. The 
ground on which it has stood has been deemed 
holy. The very soil within its courts has been 
carried over seas as a memorial of divine virtues. 
By human law, crime has been sometimes so 
gauged as to reach its climax in an act of sacri- 
lege. The avenger of blood, in hot pursuit of 
the murderer, has stopped short on the threshold 
of a sanctuary, lest by entering with revengeful 
purpose he should commit a more damning 
crime than that which he sought to punish. 

Such a Temple of God is a regenerate soul. 
The thoughts of such a soul may be the radiation 
of the thoughts of God. Its emotions may be 
tremulous with the sensibility of God. Its pur- 
poses may be decrees of the Will of God. Its 
entire character may be a similitude of the holi- 
ness of God.- Its life, therefore, may be the 
life of God, and its joy the peace of God. A 
man may have reason to stand in awe of him- 
self. He may be an object of reverence to an 
observant universe, as a being who is filled with 



CONSECRATED BEING. 217 

the fulness of God. This is Christian privilege. 
Realized in experience or not, the Christian 
prerogative towers to this height. 

So inspired men measured a regenerate life 
by the very name by which they distinguished 
one who had experienced the new birth. Why 
should our modern speech have dropped the 
title of "saint," in designating a converted man? 
Why should it sound eccentric to our ears that 
a quaint Christian like George Muller should 
speak of ministering to the " saints of Bristol ? " 
That conception of a holy thing, of a sacred be- 
ing, of a soul set apart by a Godlike initiation 
to Godlike uses, is the scriptural idea of the 
humblest friend of Christ. 

No fear of an affected sanctimony should re- 
pel us from this ideal of a soul's hallowed affini- 
ty with God. No deference to an earthly dialect 
should forbid us to honor this ideal as a reality 
in our speech. The dignity of a soul culminates 
in this conception. The diction of the Scrip- 
tures is full of it. We are kings ; we are 
priests ; we are the elect of God ; we are saints 
of the Most High ; we are judges of angels ; we 
are joint-heirs with Christ. These homelike 



218 THE NEW BIRTH. 

verities of our Christian vows are not a farce ; 
because we are the Temple of God. In his 
view of us, the light of his own mind irradiates, 
and the benignity of his own heart enkindles 
our being. Therefore it is that the meanest of 
us all are precious to him. Whoso toucheth us 
toucheth the apple of his eye. He that offend- 
eth one of us, it were better for him that a mill- 
stone were hanged about his neck, and he were 
cast into the sea. 

THE INDWELLING OF THE SPIRIT NOT AN INCARNATION. 

We do not hold a mystical interpretation of 
God's indwelling. That is not necessary ; nor 
indeed does it help us to reduce to an experi- 
ence our conception of the enshrinement of God 
in a human soul. We must not part with nor 
confound the sense of our own individuality. 
We need not struggle to assimilate our union 
with God to that of the union of Deity with the 
man Jesus. The residence of God in a contrite 
heart is not an incarnation of Divinity. We 
need not strain the figurative speech of inspira- 
tion, so as to derive from it the notion of some 



THE EXPRESSION OF GOD. 219 

sort of essential union of which we can form no 
definite idea. We neither dignify nor intensify 
our thought of the abiding of God with us by 
any such struggle. We materialize it rather, 
and so degrade it. 

The expression of God by the act of personal 
Deity is all that we can know of his presence 
anywhere. What more than this can we know 
of his omnipresence in the material creation? 
Wherever a Divine thought is, there is the mind 
of God. Wherever an outgoing of Divine love 
occurs, there is the heart of God. Wherever a 
Divine energy works, there is the will of God. 
We know nothing of effluences of the Divine 
Essence. Be it in a star or in a soul, God is 
wherever there is an expression of his perfec- 
tions. Differing in glory, indeed, as one star 
from another, and as a spirit in God's image 
transcends both, yet the Divine emanations are 
from one Being, whose expression of himself in 
any form, and in minutest degree, is sufficient 
to hallow a locality or to consecrate a soul. 

The sacredness of an expression of God exists, 
also, only to the mind which thinks it. The 
Shekinah was no hallowed thing to the bullock 



220 THE NEW BIRTH. 

which stood up for sacrifice ; but a ladder in a 
man's dream could transform a field of almond- 
trees into a Bethel, and a pillow of stones into 
an altar, at which the dreamer should say, 
trembling : " How dreadful is this place ! The 
Lord is here and I knew it not ! " So, one 
flower in the desert of Sahara, blooming forth 
its expression of the benevolence of Him who 
from eternity had purposed that it should there 
and then be a memorial of that benevolence to 
Mungo Park, could render that spot like the 
gate of heaven. 

In like manner, then., a regenerate soul, as 
the habitation of a sanctifying influence, becomes 
a temple of the Holy Ghost no less really than 
if the very essence of the Deity were incarnate 
in the body which encloses that soul. We speak 
the wisdom of God in a mystery. Such a soul 
is sacred to holy uses. It may be contracted in 
its range of intellect ; but to the eye of God it 
is a chosen shrine. It may be low in the scale 
of human birth ; yet it is more than the kindred 
of angels. A slave it may be by human law, 
and yet a son of the King of kings. That scarred 
body in which it dwells is a consecrated thing ; 



THE TYRAXNY OF REMORSE. 221 

the death of it is precious in the Lord's sight. 
Whoso defiles that temple of God, him will 
God destroy. 

n. 

TEE RESTORATION OF LOST SELF-RESPECT, 

The residence of the Holy Spirit in a renewed 
heart discloses, furthermore, the only method 
by which a sinner may honestly recover a sense 
of personal dignity. 

THE TYRANNY OF REMORSE. 

It is one of the evil incidents of guilt that a 
man loses himself by it. Confidence in his own 
integrity, complacency in his own history, es- 
teem for his own worth, trust in his own honor, 
assurance of his own dignity, joy in his own 
conscience, — all the chivalrous emotions by 
which a pure being is permitted to exult in 
the very consciousness of existence, — are swept 
away by the first breath of sin felt to be sin. 
An unholy man, as such, can no more honor 
himself than Satan can. Guilt must be painted 



222 THE XEW BIRTH. 

before it can look its own image in the eye. It 
must be bedizened with disguises before it can 
hold up its head and walk loftily. A guilty 
man must cheat himself before he can respect 
himself. This he cannot do under the espionage 
of a remorseful conscience. Remorse is hawk- 
eyed and savagely honest. It searches every- 
where, sees everything, keeps nothing back. It 
is more pitiless than death. A sinner enthralled 
by it can neither bear it nor brave it. He must 
be crushed by the consciousness of degradation. 
He must live in self-abhorrence. 

If this were not so, extreme guilt might be 
saved from the extreme of punishment. A man, 
however depraved, might bear the brunt of a 
world's loathing, if he could be raised above 
self-loathing. Is it not conceivable that Judas 
Iscariot might be calm under the execrations of 
the universe, if he could stupefy the conscious- 
ness of deserving them? We cannot be assured 
that Omnipotence can crush incorrigible guilt 
otherwise than by forms of retribution which 
shall compel it to know itself. 

From this " lower deep " underneath the "low- 
est," in which a sinner feels, as Milton's Satan 



THE TREACHERY OF PRIDE. 223 

did, "Myself am hell," a sinner needs deliver- 
ance. We all need it. If we have never felt 
by anticipation this tyranny of Remorse, so 
surely as we are sinners unforgiv en, it is lurking 
for us in the future, like an assassin in the dark, 
and we need a rescue. How shall we obtain 
it ? How shall we get back a consciousness of 
something in us which we shall dare to hon- 
or? Without such a consciousness, immortality, 
which we crave so thirstily, must become an 
intolerable burden, and nowhere of more leaden 
weight than in heaven. How shall we recover 
a self-knowledge which can endure eternity? 

Can pride restore it? The pride of Satan 
does not hope for so much as that. The first 
honest hour we have when we are brought face 
to face with God, will disclose to us that pride 
is one of the meanest of the mental vices ; the 
most contracted, the most selfish, and the most 
false-hearted ; and therefore the first to betray a 
man to despair, and the most eager and relent- 
less in heaping upon him shame and everlasting 
contempt. The facts of life discover a subtile 
affinity between pride and suicide. 



224 THE NEW BIRTH, 



THE DISCOVERIES OF A PURE CONSCIENCE. 

But what is the working of the soul in its 
introspection, when once opened to the ingress 
of the Holy Spirit ? 

Is there no re-awakening of self-respect, when 
the evidence of that Divine presence first be- 
comes clear to consciousness? The cleansing 
blood of Christ, once made a reality to faith by 
the illumining grace of God, — can one get no 
buoyancy of heart from that ? The dropping off 
of the soul's corruptions, the fading away of its 
"guilty stains," under the discipline of the 
Sanctifier, — cannot one derive from that pro- 
cess, however gradual, some new sense of dig- 
nity? The blotting out of the past from the 
record of conscience; the opening of a fresh, 
clean page for the future reckoning ; the first 
throbbing life, however infantile, of that which 
the Scriptures call a "pure conscience," — can 
one find in these no ground of hope that one 
may yet become an object of one's own 
esteem ? 

In that awful and yet precious alliance with 



ALLIANCE WITH GOD. 225 

Godhead, we are raised to think the thoughts 
of God. We are invited to share in the benign 
sympathies of God. We are welcome to exe- 
cute in our own intensified individuality, and 
yet in dear subjection to his bidding, the pur- 
poses of God. We are assured that He does 
not deem himself degraded by his union with 
us. From eternity he has chosen us to this. 
Before the geologic cycles began, he had us in 
his thoughts for this. With clear foresight of 
our disgusting guilt, he did not waver in the 
choice. When he repented that he had made 
man upon the earth, our names were engraven 
upon the palm of his hand. Through all the 
ages that have come and gone, he has held us 
faithfully in mind. His experience of our way- 
wardness has never turned his loving eye from 
us. His royal decree towards us has run in 
this one groove, without variableness or shadow 
of turning. And now, in the fulness of time, 
when that decree approaches its consummation, 
he condescends to think it honorable to that 
glory which the heaven of heavens cannot con- 
tain, to abide with us, even with us, with the 
meanest and most guilty of us, to dwell within us, 

15 



226 THE NEW BIRTH. 

to work in ns his own good pleasure, to the intent 
that even by us should be made known his wis- 
dom unto principalities and powers. In all this, 
is not some foundation laid for the rebuilding of 
that consciousness of worth which we have lost? 
Shall we not dare at length to respect that which 
God has thus ennobled? Who shall lay any- 
thing to the charge of God's elect ? 

True, it requires great faith to appropriate 
this dignity to ourselves. Self-abasement may 
often struggle with the assurance of this Divine 
indwelling. Said a dying Christian to a friend, 
w I sent for you to tell you how happy I am. I 
did not think it possible for a man to enjoy so 
much of God on earth. I never asked for joy ; 
I always thought myself unworthy of it ; but he 
has given me more than I asked. It seems as 
if it cannot be for me ; as if it must be for 
somebody else ; I do not deserve it. I am 
filled with God. I know that he is in me, and 
I in him. I shall see him as he is. I delight 
in knowing that." Thus, even in a saint whose 
vision is a foresight of heaven, faith may have 
to struggle into consciousness of his own 



THE LAST OUDEAL. 227 

grandeur; but the grandeur is none the less 
real for that. 

What shall ive then say to these things ? If 
God be for us, who can be against us? We 
are more than conquerors through him that 
loved us. Here is ground for self-esteem which 
has no root of arrogance. We only honor that 
which God has honored. Self-abasement and 
self-complacency here go hand in hand. " Not 
unto us, not unto us ! " we say, yet in the same 
breath we add : " Now are we the sons of God, 
and what we shall be doth not yet appear." 

COURAGE IN THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 

Have we not often imagined that redeemed 
souls must have a strange meeting at the judg- 
ment, when the secrets of hearts shall be re- 
vealed? Is the prospect of it altogether wel- 
come to us? It has been said that, if in this 
world every man's h§art could be open to the 
gaze of every other man, no two could ever 
again be friends, for no two could look each 
other in the eye. How, then, will our self- 
respect bear the last ordeal? The beloved 



228 THE NEW BIRTH. 

apostle gives us the answer. " God dwelleth in 
us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, 
and he in us, because he hath given us of his 
Spirit. We know that when he shall appear, 
we shall be like him. Herein is our love made 
perfect, that we may have boldness in the day 
of judgment, because as he is so are we." If 
we indeed know this, why should we not be 
bold? 

In that day, we shall revere in others the 
clear image of God, wrought by God's own 
hand. They will revere the same in us. We 
shall meet each other without a blush. Some 
of our departed kindred have been glorified so 
long before us, that we are apt to think of them 
as vastly our superiors. Their distance from us, 
which years are lengthening, disheartens us. 
But we shall overtake them, and that will be no 
crestfallen meeting. We shall receive their 
welcome without confusion. We shall not fear 
their secret contempt when they take us by the 
hand. Their greetings will have no hollow 
sound. The salutations of angels will not abash 
us. The morning stars, which exult in a sinless 
history of thousands of years, will not look 



INTENSITY OF HOLY LIFE. 229 

chillingly upon us. Gabriel, Michael, the seven 
spirits before the throne, will not recognize us 
haughtily. Even the eye of the Infinite One will 
not close itself in disgust at our appearing. It 
shall search us, — He that formed the eye, shall 
not he see? — it shall search us indeed, but as 
light searches a prism. It shall find only itself 
reflected at every angle, and in a radiance of 
beauty which nothing but itself could evoke. 

m. 

INTENSITY OF REGENERATE LIFE. 

If such be the dignity to which a regenerate 
soul attains through the presence and working 
of God within it, it is further obvious that the 
tendency of renewed character must be to mani- 
fest itself in intense forms of experience. 

It is a law of all nature, that vigorous forces 
shall act themselves out. We look for results 
proportioned to the power which produces them. 
Do we not expect that fire will burn, that light 
will be visible, that thunder will be audible, and 
that lightning will leave a mark where it strikes ? 
The most latent elements lead to a disclosure 



230 THE NEW BIRTH, 

of themselves. Any great energy in nature, 
however breathless in its operation, must sooner 
or later be discovered. Electricity could not 
forever hide itself from detection by some one 
of the human senses. Even while undetected in 
itself, the electric force must work, and its work- 
ing be visible in results. So much power, — 
so much product, is the law. 

Why should not the same law hold good in 
the spiritual world ? Shall infinite perfection 
express itself, and seem to find the blessedness 
of its being in self-expression, in all things 
elsewhere, and yet find no egress through the 
human spirit which is so like it? It surely 
must be the law of God's working in a soul, to 
become manifest to observers. Such a power 
must act itself out in unequivocal effects. 

LATENT PIETY UNNATURAL. 

The tendencies of regenerate beings, then, 
must be averse to concealment. Christian char- 
acter absolutely latent in a soul would be an 
anomaly among the works of God. It must 
tend to, not only self-expression, 'but to great 
positiveness of evidence. The law of its being 



INTENSITY OF GRACE. 231 

is to be self-evident. A renewed mind is natu- 
rally a transparent being through whom the holi- 
ness of God reflects itself in human graces. If 
such positive evidence of piety do not appear, 
a presumption is established that the piety itself 
does not exist. True, God will not quench the 
smoking flax, but he will enkindle it. It is not 
the nature of anything that is on fire to smoul- 
der forever ; if it is a living fire it will burn 
into a flame. So the life of God in the soul 
must tend to intensity of development. 

The most intense life ever lived on this earth 
should naturally be a life energized by the Holy 
Ghost. In such a life the intellect may expe- 
rience a marvellous awakening. The tendency 
of its working is to the positiveness of knowl- 
edge. Probabilities grow to certainties in the 
convictions of such a mind. Belief becomes 
assurance. The range of intellectual vision ex- 
pands as the soul ascends the mount of its 
transfiguration. Dr. Chalmers was an accom- 
plished astronomer when he was the unconverted 
pastor of Kilmany ; but the world did not know 
it. Why? Because the power of the "Astro- 
nomical Discourses " was not in him then. 



232 THE NEW BIRTH. 

Even an inferior intellect becomes, through 
the quickening of profound sensibilities by the 
indwelling of God, susceptible of exertions 
which make men honorable among men. There 
is a wonderful educating force in the working 
of grace upon the most unpromising natures. 
John Howard was not constitutionally a man of 
commanding intellect. The universities of Eng- 
land despised him, for he was not of them. It 
was his life-long affliction that he could not 
write a letter of considerable length with an 
assurance of its grammatical accuracy. But 
when the indwelling of God had wrought in 
him, the world found him out and now is proud 
of him. 

IS REGENERATE EXPERIENCE FANATICAL? 

In this view, there is nothing singular in the 
charge of fanaticism upon a regenerated man. 
Such a man, acting out obediently the power 
which is within him, will never escape that 
charge, in one form or another, till the world is 
filled with such fanatics. It was not much learn- 
ing, it was much grace, that made Paul seem a 
madman to Festus. "As for Chalmers, he is 



A TEST OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 233 

mad " — so said the noble ones of Scotland when 
that voice, as of one crying in the wilderness, 
began to be heard from the solitude of Kilmany. 
It has been said " of all great workers and think- 
ers of the world," that their power is a "force 
as of madness, in the hands of reason." Vastly 
more significant is this of the K power of an end- 
less life," awakened and girded through the 
union of a soul with the Infinite Mind. 

We may test, therefore, by this criterion, di- 
verse types of professedly Christian experience. 
Many such offer themselves to our observation 
in real life ; which of them exhibits, by its in- 
tensity, the keenest sympathy with the working 
of an infinite power in the soul ? One ideal of 
Christian character invites to a life of self-in- 
dulgence. Surely, the indwelling of God never 
originated that. Another conception of the 
Christian faith degrades it to a gauge of respect- 
ability in society, or of refinement in culture, 
Is it possible that the witness of the Holy Ghost 
has ever testified to that ? 

A certain model of Christian profession is re- 
markable for its effeminacy. It represents one 
who is ashamed to speak, and who cannot labor 



234 THE NEW BIRTH. 

and dare not suffer, for Christ. He assumes 
the reality of a latent godliness. His reticent 
speech proclaims only the secrecy of religion as 
an affair between the soul and God. His theory 
of life, his social habits, the companionship he 
seeks, the amusements he approves, his uses of 
property, of time, of culture, and of mental gifts, 
all tend to obliterate the distinction between the 
church and the world, between "saint" and 
" sinner. " In all those things which would make 
godliness visible to observers, he approaches 
as near to a "world lying in wickedness " as he 
can approach without arousing that world's con- 
tempt for him as a hypocrite. Is it conceiv- 
able that such a model of a Christ-like life was 
ever wrought by the "exceeding greatness of 
God's power"? Did the Spirit ever help our 
infirmities with groanings which cannot be ut- 
tered, to evoke such an ideal from the depths of 
our souls ? Has it ever cost a man strong crying 
and tears to execute it? 

From such a type of Christianity it is but a 
step to that represented by one who can ridicule 
Christian missions in their inception, admire the 
romance of them in their progress, and pour 



CHRISTIAN LIFE GODLIKE. 235 

unctuous adulations upon their success ; who is 
always in sympathy with the world in its carica- 
tures of Christian doctrine ; who can amuse 
himself alike with nicknames of Christian re- 
vivals, with jeers at Christian reforms, and with 
burlesques of Christian men. Can it be that an 
Infinite Mind is dwelling, thinking, feeling, 
working in that little soul? We can discern the 
handiwork of God in the brain of a butterfly ; 
his work there is opposite to the thing he works 
upon. But who can discover any traces of God 
in such a model of Christian character ? 

When God works in a human spirit he works 
as he did when he created that spirit. He pro- 
duces something which is like himself. He 
quickens into being a thing which expresses it- 
self in a Godlike way. He inspires a character 
which is built on intense convictions, which take 
possession of a man, and which claim and use the 
whole of him. Such convictions, wielded by 
such a Power, make life earnest, because they 
make Eternity real and God absolute. Nothing 
else grates so harshly against the grain of a re- 
generate nature as to be either a hypocrite or 
but half a man in religious life. The germ of a 



236 THE NEW BIRTH. 

martyr is in every soul which God has chosen 
as his abode. Humble and contrite, indeed, is 
the spirit with which he dwells, but under his re- 
viving lofty and jubilant as the morning ; Weak, 
faint, cast down, ready to perish, it may be ; but 
in his strength a conqueror. Sensitive to suf- 
fering, timid in peril, a woman in delicacy of 
nerve, a child in resolution, it has often been ; 
but through communion with an infinite Friend, 
it has become so possessed with the conscious- 
ness of spiritual life and the assurance of a 
blessed immortality, that it has seen no terrors 
in death, none in torture. Such souls have re- 
served their fears for something more appalling 
than these. This intensity of regenerate life has 
made martyrs of Christian children. 



rv. 



THE WORKING OF THE SPIRIT BY DISCOVERABLE 
LA WS. 

Such paradoxes of holy experience as we 
have just observed are not contradictions. They 
are not even anomalies. Marvellous as they 
seem to observers, inexplicable as they appear 



LAWS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 237 

to minds which are oblivious of the Divine en- 
ergy in them, they are but the normal results of 
the dwelling of Gocl in tried souls. Yv r e should 
therefore observe further, the dependence of the 
growth of regenerate character upon conformity 
to the laws of the Holy Spirit's working. 

In ascribing laws to the process by which a 
soul is sanctified, we only affirm the oneness of 
God. YTe only assume that in spiritual opera- 
tions he works, in this respect, as he does in 
nature. In the one as in the other, Law is the 
expression of the very mind of God. Caprice 
can find no lodgment in an infinite Will. An 
arbitrary act can surely find no more place in 
the redemption of a soul than in the creation of 
light. 

But are the laws of spiritual agency in a re- 
generate mind discoverable ? Certainly, so far 
as their discovery can be serviceable to their suc- 
cess. True, Divine energy in the new birth is 
likened to the wind ; but even the wind, in the 
very phenomenon of its blowing where it listeth 
and hiding the whence and the whither, yields 
up to wise observation some of the laws which 
govern its apparent vagaries. So is every one 



238 THE NEW BIRTH. 

that is born of the Spirit. Some of the laws of 
the Holy Ghost reveal themselves among the 
first lessons of a regenerate life. They lie open 
for inspection, also, in certain injunctions of the 
Scriptures. 

THE LAW OF HARMONY WITH OTHER REVELATIONS OF GOD. 

It surely may be accepted as a law of the 
working of the Spirit in the soul, that its teach- 
ings will harmonize with other revelations of 
Gocl. God cannot contradict God. God in 
Creation, God in Providence, God in His re- 
vealed Word, will confirm the witness of the 
Spirit in the heart which he has hallowed as his 
Temple. To a docile mind which is watching 
for a disclosure of the Divine Will, there is 
often an overpowering reciprocity of evidence 
which leaves no room for a doubt. One stands 
as in the focus of an amphitheatre of mountains, 
in which one hears from all sides the reverbe- 
rations of a single voice. It is as if, by some 
mysterious law of infinite being, the Divine 
mind held communion with itself through the 
medium of the faculties of a man. That voice 



THE LAW OF HARMONY. 239 

seems to be his own — it is his own, and yet 
another's. 

Hence it is that those Christians who give 
evidence of being most profoundly moved by 
the Spirit of God, are those who most rever- 
ently study the word and the providences of 
God. They expect one revelation of the In- 
finite Mind to give answer to another. They 
interpret the one by the response of the other. 
They tread softly, listening for the echo from 
without to the intimation within. Such Chris- 
tians do not become wronsr-headed nor drivellino; 
believers. They are not suffered often to mis- 
take a wayward fancy or a whiff of self-conceit 
for a divine impulse in their souls. They do 
not see visions nor dream dreams. Their faith 
and their good sense grow abreast w^ith each 
other. 

THE LAW OF HARMONY WITH THE NATURE OF MTXD. 

Is it not an equally positive law of the Holy 
Spirit's working, that it moves in and through 
the natural law r s of the soul itself? It creates 
no new elements of mind. It introduces no new 
principles of mental action. It is simply one 



240 THE KEW BIRTH. 

work of God within another. It is a Spirit en- 
ergizing a spirit. Divine influence transfuses 
itself through the natural operations of human 
intellect, of human sensibilities, and of human 
will, so delicately in the process, and so evenly 
in the result, that the mind is unconscious of 
any other efficiency than its own. Divine in- 
dwelling does not disclose itself as such to the 
consciousness of the believer, as electricity does 
not display its presence as such in the sensations 
of the healthy body which it pervades. The 
kingdom of God in the soul cometh not with 
observation. 

Sanctification is not to be looked for, there- 
fore, in shocks of spasmodic piety. It is not to 
be discovered by dissecting one's own being in 
search of Him who is past finding out. It is 
not to be augmented by stimulating devotional 
fervor into turbulence. From passionate prayer 
the soul, by a necessity of its nature, must sink 
back into apathy. 

Such vibration between extremes is a very 
different phenomenon from that which is so 
generally witnessed in profound Christian expe- 
rience, and which expresses itself in the sense 



SPIRITUAL INFIRMITIES, 241 

of conflict. Probationary discipline necessarily 
involves struggle. Besides conflicts with sin, 
known and felt to be sin, a renewed soul may 
have struggles with infirmity, through which a 
holy life may sometimes become a life of strong 
crying and tears. Then it is, especially, that 
the Spirit helps us. Yet even this, if it be- 
comes habitual, evinces disproportion in the 
growth of regenerate experience. Two very 
similar distortions may induce it. One is a dis- 
proportion of intellect ; the other a dispropor- 
tion of sensibility. Let intellectual conceptions 
of God gain a large overgrowth upon the out- 
goings of the heart to him in love ; or let sen- 
sibility to the Divine presence outgrow intelli- 
gence of the Divine character ; in either case, 
the being of the man becomes disjointed. It 
works unequally and inconstantly. His prog- 
ress is full of breaks and delays in which his 
struggle is not with sin consciously indulged, 
but simply with the obliquity of his mental 
habits. His soul yearns to recover its lost 
equipoise. An old legend reads that a saint 
once longed and fasted and prayed for a vision 
of God which should equal his seraphic ardor. 

16 



242 THE NEW BIRTH. 

But when the archangel took him and carried 
him swiftly up through the immensity of space, 
he began to tremble, and cried out for relief 
from the intolerable sense of God's infinity. 

The Holy Spirit is more kindly considerate 
of our infirmities than we ourselves sometimes 
are. He does not call them sins. And yet the 
most finished experience of the Divine indwell- 
ing balances, and at length rectifies them. It 
quiets painful vibrations. It acts as a sedative 
to spasms of godliness. It is emphatically the 
very life of God in the soul. It tends to make 
a man like God ; and His being is not made 
up of alternations between ecstasy and despair. 
Such an equable force of vitality will evince 
itself in an experience which resembles the 
throb of a calm, strong, healthy heart. The 
Scriptures symbolize it by a well of water — 
the most refreshing thing in Nature ; a peren- 
nial thing; not stagnant yet not boisterous; 
transparent and spontaneous ; springing up in 
the morning and at noon and at eventide and in 
the night watches. 

It should be remembered, therefore, that in re- 
ligious life, as in other developments of character, 



THE LAW OF COOPERATION. 243 

the most intense minds are not the most turbu- 
lent. God's presence is their natural atmos- 
phere, in which they live and move and have 
their being tranquilly, because with an intensity 
which acts through the natural forces of charac- 
ter, and pervades them all alike. Hence it is 
that the noblest of renewed men have been men 
of the most generous range of graces. The 
manly and the feminine virtues, the contempla- 
tive and the active, the massive and the minute, 
the impulsive and the circumspect, have been 
intertwined in symmetry. The beauty of the 
Lord our God has been upon them. Christ had 
no eccentricities. He had not even those of 
genius, of which the world is so tolerant. Yet 
what other life has been so intense as his ? 

THE LAW OF CO-OPERATION. 

We cannot mistake in recognizing as another 
law of the Holy Spirit, that his work shall be 
concurrent with the will of the regenerate soul 
itself. Sanctification is a co-operative process. 
It may be suspended by resistance, and acceler- 
ated by obedience to the Divine impulses. The 
Spirit may be " grieved " by the desecration of 



244 THE NEW BIRTH. 

the temple he has chosen. There is a reason in 
the nature of his work for that fearful admoni- 
tion : "Quench not the Spirit." What more 
affecting exhibition is conceivable of the conde- 
scension of God, than this mystery of forbear- 
ance, in which the Holy Ghost stands as if in 
waiting upon the choices of the poor, guilty 
sufferer whom he yearns to save? What a 
glimpse, too, of the reach of the responsibility 
of a regenerate soul, of its dignities and its 
perils, is here ! Not by the breadth of a hair 
will the sovereignty of God invade the enclos- 
ure of that soul's freedom. The soul itself, in 
its own individuality, is the thing he would save. 
Its own love is the thing he craves. Its own 
submission is the right he claims. Its own 
chosen obedience is the service he requires. 
Its own heart is the gift he stoops to ask for. 
For aught that we know, God could translate 
that lost soul up to the group of the presence- 
angels and make a Gabriel of it. But this 
would not be, in the Divine estimate of things, 
so noble an achievement of Power, as to win 
that soul just as it is, in its feebleness, in -its 
diminutive, human, fallen being, — to allure it 



GROWTH BY OBEDIENCE. 245 

by the infinite ingenuity of love to give itself 
away to him willingly. Nothing less than this 
will satisfy the generosity of Christ. This, 
therefore, is adopted as a principle governing 
the operations of the Spirit — that holiness 
shall be a man's own choice. He shall have all 
that he wills to have. Blessed is he if he hun- 
gers and thirsts for it, for he shall be filled. 

Hence the Scriptures teach just what Chris- 
tian experience proves — that Christian devel- 
opment advances in the line of Christian duties. 
He shall have it in most affluent increase who 
uses most diligently what he has. To him that 
hath shall be given. The power of a life hid 
with Christ is not to be hoped for in either an 
indolent or a despondent waiting for a Divine 
afflatus. Supernatural influence coming to a 
man in such conditions of soul is more likely 
to be from below than from above. Graces 
come in groups to the soul that is open and 
receptive of Divine suggestions. They throng 
around him who is watching for them in the 
way of duty. A wise man's eagerness to be 
like God will expend itself in doing for God. 
So much obedience — so much growth ; this is 



246 THE NEW BIRTH. 

the law. God worketh in you — therefore 
work ye ; this is the charge. 

THE LAW OF SANCTIFICATION BY PRAYER. 

In the same line of thought, is it not equally 
certain that a law of gracious energy in the soul 
makes its growth dependent on the expression 
of its desires in trustful prayer? True, the 
desire itself must be inspired by the very Being 
who is its object ; yet this is the method of an 
unsearchable wisdom. The interchanges of 
fellowship between a renewed mind and its 
Divine Guest are very wonderful. Herein is 
the mystery of communion with God. We 
talk of it glibly, but how little do we know of 
it ! He quickens desire in his regenerate friend, 
that he may gratify it ; and he gratifies the 
desire that he may augment it by indulgence ; 
so that it may express itself again, to be grati- 
fied anew. Prayer, and response prompting 
again to prayer, to be again responded to — 
thus the life that is hid with Christ in God un- 
folds itself in the consciousness of the believer. 
It is a sublime antiphony between heaven and 
earth, to which he is the only listener. 



FRIENDS OF GOD. 247 

The Scriptures speak in terms of awful fa- 
miliarity of the inter-communion of God and 
godly men. Enoch walked with God, and was 
not, for God took him. Abraham was the 
friend of God. What is the meaning of that 
soliloquy over the plains of Sodom ? fr Shall I 
hide from Abraham that thing which I do?" 
It is as if Jehovah condescends to say : " Abra- 
ham is my friend ; he has given me his confi- 
dence ; I have admitted him into affectionate 
fellowship ; and now, is it honorable to conceal 
from him my purpose towards his kindred?" 
Who, again, was the nameless friend of Jacob? 
We are told that " there wrestled a man with 
him till the breaking of the day." Could any 
symbol express the intimacy of equals more 
forcibly than that old story of the Athletes in 
the field of Peniel? Yet, when the sun rose, 
Jacob said: "I have seen God, face to face." 
Go up with Moses into the thick darkness 
where God dwells, and hear God speaking to 
him as a man speaketh to his friend. Who is 
He that says of David, as one of us would 
speak of the friend dearest to us : K He is a 
man after my own heart " ? 



248 THE NEW BIRTH, 

What indeed is the significance of the In- 
carnation, in this respect, but that of an ex- 
pression of God's desire to come down into the 
homes and hearts of men, to restore to them 
the holy freedom of Eden in which his voice 
was heard in the cool of the day ? Listen to 
the benediction which is wafted over the whole 
world of believers : "I call you not servants, but 
friends ; I have chosen you ; I will send the 
Comforter unto you ; He shall abide with you ; 
Ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be 
full." 

Here then we reach the culmination of the 
history of man's communion with the Godhead. 
It is in this gift of the Holy Spirit, who descends 
to dwell with men on terms of holy and yet 
familiar friendship . No law of Christian growth , 
therefore, is more pertinent than that of its de- 
pendence on the expression of Christian desire 
in trustful prayer. As prayer is, so is the con- 
dition of the soul's union with God. A grow- 
ing piety will be sensible of this instinctively. 
A regenerate soul in which the work of grace 
is not suspended will pray, simply because it 
may pray. Prayer will be to such a one a 



RETRIBUTIVE DREAD OF PRAYER. 249 

homelike, childlike intercourse of friend with 
friend. The indwelling of God invites to this 
kind of prayer, and renders all ideas of prayer 
which are incongruous with this absurd. 

Regenerate experience exhibits in this re- 
spect an impressive divergence from that of 
impenitence. Nothing else discloses as prayer 
does that extreme guilt and eminent godliness 
are at opposite poles of spiritual life. There is 
a degree of guilt in which a man can conceive 
of nothing else so appalling to him as the 
thought of asking a blessing from God. That 
thought brings God too near. Men in despair, 
on death-beds, have writhed with redoubled 
anguish when urged to beg for Divine mercy. 
"Do not name prayer to me," said Thomas 
Paine, in his last hours. By a terrible law of 
retribution, a soul abandoned by the Holy Spirit 
starts back, shuddering, from the idea of the 
lost possibility of his friendship. It is like one 
in a frightful dream, who cannot shout for help, 
and who is in the more frantic agony because 
he cannot. 

But to one in whom the indwelling of God is 
deepening and expanding, so that he at length 



250 THE NEW BIRTH. 

becomes, like Stephen, full of the Holy Ghost, 
prayer becomes an habitual joy, like any other 
habit of sacred friendship. Only to such a 
man is the poetic ideal of prayer lifelike — that 
it is a "Christian's vital breath," his "native air." 
John Foster, on his death-bed, observing that 
his strength was fast leaving him, said : " But I 
can pray, and that is a glorious thing." The 
glory of the thing is very apt to loom up in 
the soul's vision as it approaches heaven. 

THE LAW OF TRUST IN A DIVINE PLAN. 

Once more, is it not also a law of the Holy 
Spirit which is vital to Christian growth, that 
his work in the renewed soul is carried on by 
a plan which will surely be consummated ? It 
has no contingencies unknown to God or not 
provided for in his purposes. The entire pro- 
cess is part of a system of decrees. It is en- 
closed and embedded in a plan of which no eye 
has ever seen the beginning, and none will ever 
see the end. 

For the most symmetrical Christian growth, 
therefore, our hopes and methods of Christian 
culture need to be constructed upon faith in 



TRUST IN THE DIVINE PLAN. 251 

sanctification as being, not only a practicable 
achievement, but a result which is fixed by 
everlasting purposes. It should be a reality to 
us that we have been, and are, and shall be in 
the thoughts and in the heart of God forever and 
forever. We may conceive of this as " election," 
w decree," " eternal purpose ; " whatever we name 
it in our theology, it is simply the execution of a 
plan which was never a novelty and will never be 
obsolete in the Divine Mind. God has no ca- 
prices about it, and no after-thoughts. 

We need to individualize this faith by appro- 
priating the object of it, each soul to itself. 
We need this for the comfort of it. We need 
it more for the courage it gives, and the equa- 
nimity of effort which it inspires. Doubt weak- 
ens, fear disarms, in a spiritual conflict, as in 
any other. Why should it not be so ? But an 
experience which is built upon faith in the 
eternal fidelity of God's friendship promotes a 
buoyant piety. It stimulates Christian charac- 
ter to a rapid and even expansion. It awakens 
exultation in the individuality of the soul's 
union with God. A living psalmist has feel- 



252 TEE NEW BIRTH. 

ingly expressed this phase of Christian life in 



Yes, for me, for me He careth 

With a brother's tender care ; 
Yes, with me, with me He shareth 

Every burden, every fear. 

Yes, o'er me, o'er me He watcheth, 
Ceaseless watcheth, night and day ; 

Yes, even me, even me He snatcheth 
Erom the perils of the way. 

Yes, in me, in me He dwelleth ; 

I in him and He in me ! 
And my empty soul He filleth, 

Here and through eternity. 

Thus I wait for his returning, 
Singing all the way to Heaven : 

Such the joyful song of morning, 
Such the tranquil song of even. 

It requires great faith, indeed, to appropriate 
thus to ourselves the liberty of Christian joy. 
But surely that is not a Christlike humility which 
esteems piety in proportion to the distrust it 
cherishes of one's own salvation. One who 
can say honestly with the apostle : I f? know that 
He is able to keep that which I have committed 
unto him," will have much of the Pauline vi^or 

7 c? 



CHRISTIAN VIGOR. 253 

of character in other respects. The mind of 
such a man will have strong affinities with Light. 
Joy will be his native element. Genial and 
cheering views of truth will be the spontaneous 
expression of his strength. He can hold such 
views close to his own conscience, a sinner 
though he be, because he has a history of rev- 
erent familiarity with God, in which his soul 
has learned the secret of sympathy with the 
blessedness of God. 



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